


Our slow, unreckoning hearts

by lilith_morgana



Series: Sense and accountability [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-17
Packaged: 2018-02-19 13:03:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2389241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When war is the life you've been given and the future is increasingly unclear, you must at least try to make some sense of the still hours in between. Elissa Cousland/Loghain Mac Tir. Sequel to "Cartography".</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

_Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,_

_The long numbers that rocket the mind;_

_Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,_

_Unable to fear what is too strange._

_Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race._

_How should we dream of this place without us?-_

**Advice to a Prophet – Richard Wilbur**

.

* * *

**PROLOGUE**

 

* * *

  
  
There is magic in the stones around them.

Elissa observes it in Anders' face as he seems to drag power from the walls and wield it like a massive blade around them, above them, flashes of it streaming inside her when she forces herself forward, burying her swords in the broodmother one last time.

She feels it under her own skin as well, as a tickling presence here deep down in the belly of Drake's Fall. A quiet song in her blood, mingling with the screams of darkspawn and the burning exhaustion in her throat; a rhythm keeping her company as she falls, her arms and legs too tired to hold her upright.

She can feel it radiating from the very ground as she finally gives herself over to the boundless exhaustion and the release in sinking back into this downward swirl of emptiness and silence.

_Silence_.

The world that lately has lost its contours now seems to fade entirely in a blaze. Elissa lets it go. For a moment she lets it  _go_  and there is no more war, no more duty and all her choices have ceased to matter, have raised themselves far beyond her reach. For a moment, there is peace. She no longer hears Nathaniel in her head, disagreeing about the offer made by the darkspawn that called himself the Architect and she no longer hears herself as a dark echo of someone else: "As long as I am the Commander of the Grey, I will brook no threat to Ferelden by choosing my allies so unwisely". She no longer wonders, even briefly, if she made the wrong decision.

For a moment, brief and illusive as it is, she is free.

_Get up_ , Dog insists then, his nose cold and wet against the back of Elissa's hand. She wonders when she lost her gauntlet and stretches out her fingers experimentally, aiming for her weapons but finding only wet dirt. Glancing sideways, she spots the new sword still half-way inside the broodmother's neck and her other sword right by her side. Grimacing, Elissa sits up abruptly.

The new sword.  _Her_  new sword.

Her new sword that she had been handed by Herren a few days ago, unceremoniously, but with a remark that shot like a jolt of pain through her.  _From General Loghain. It took a while to perfect it._

There's a whole world of emotions connected to that sword, she thinks, still having to bite back the flurry of them. So much she cannot allow to pass through the tight rein she keeps on her own impulses lately, so much that shiver inside her as she walks up to the defeated creature, pulling her sword out of the stinking darkspawn corpse.

It's not yet familiar to her eyes, but seems to be perfectly adjusted to her grip, the hilt is resting softly in her hand. Even the runes and enchantments are weighed and balanced after her moves and it should not have come as such a surprise to her that Loghain had memorized her fighting style – she has defeated him twice now – but it had, and to some extent it still does.  _He_  is in that blade, ridiculous as it sounds.

It's quite possibly the finest gift she has ever received and it's so much  _more_ , so much else. Elissa draws a sharp breath, still hearing Loghain's voice in her head - slightly patronising since she is being so sentimental – and feeling the course of his blood run in her veins.

"Commander?" Sigrun asks. "Are you alright?"

Elissa turns, realising she has been staring into the darkness ahead of her, fingers curled around polished,  _perfect_  metal and her thoughts wrapped hard and firm around that one path that lies ahead.

"Let us get back to the Vigil," she says.

_And count the dead_ , nobody adds but the words hang unspoken in the air above them all the same.

.

.

.

.

Vigil's Keep is a place of measurable things these days.

A collection of pieces, of numbers; structures that can be seen and counted and understood. And because Elissa doesn't understand much else at the moment, she  _counts_ : twenty guards dead; three knights still missing in the chaos of crumbling stone and caved-in walls; dozens upon dozens of bodies being burned in the courtyard; ten crates of supplies distributed to the survivors outside of Amaranthine, another ten expected shortly.

She counts her own banal existence as well, counts the steps between the kitchen and the bedchamber, the numbers of letters she writes and the days that pass.

Numbers make sense – a chilling, rough sort of  _sense_.

In the ruins of the fortress there are empty spaces behind every word and deed, as though everything is merely ghosts now. They have lost so much and the  _immensity_  of it, of what has disappeared and slipped out of her hands, feels like a hard knot in her chest, a lump of weariness in her belly.

Elissa counts to ten and crosses the courtyard, squaring her shoulders and bracing herself, her own steps heavy against the ground, as though she's trying in vain to anchor herself in this place. Her thoughts are everywhere but here, however, like stubborn fragments they keep defying her logic and reason. They are in Highever, in Denerim, in the scattered places across the map where she has travelled and where she knows people live and darkspawn will threaten them because she doesn't possess enough Wardens to protect them all against whatever it is that endangers them now.

Her thoughts, dark and beckoning and sharp as needles, are in Orlais and whenever she realises that, it becomes a little harder to breathe.

At least the keep is becoming livable again.

They have cleared out a few rooms downstairs – rooms for eating, for sleeping, for the healers and maids to tend to the wounded – and as the order is restored in bits and pieces, they start forming new routines for their lives as well.

Elissa works hard all day, an ache in her body reminding her in the evenings of exactly  _how_  hard; she works so intently that she forgets to eat and doesn't remember until Varel places a hand on her elbow, steering her towards the kitchen.

She sleeps badly some nights, others she all but falls asleep standing up. In the early mornings she wakes, breathless, but air is dry and heavy here, drapes itself over her like mourning garb. She always gets up then and looks for something to occupy her thoughts. It's during those hours she most appreciates walking and  _measuring_ : sixty-nine lengths of her feet across the floor or a room; toes and heels and walls and windows. All palpable things that will come together around her.

She's the centre, she tells herself this in the crisp chill of her bedchamber when sleep is denied her. She is the leader, the steady hand, the one who cannot escape like she couldn't escape the fate of her family, or the course of her own blood.

So she recites the familiar words of the canticles she pretends she can still believe in. Other times she lights a candle and kneels before it, bargaining with the Maker and Andraste both, trading lives and deaths. It's what a commander always does, it shouldn't make her feel so hollow.

A fortnight after Amaranthine almost burns and the Vigil crumbles, the visitors start to arrive.

Fergus is the first one.

He rides in through the inner gates one afternoon, followed by a group of knights and Cauthrien who is a few steps behind but somehow feels closer, Elissa observes dimly through the overwhelming sense of relief at seeing her brother. He looks well, he is unharmed and he is  _here_. Her stomach flips at the realisation.

"Elissa, thank the-" Fergus says, the rest of his sentence muffled by the intensity of their embrace, his face buried in her hair.

"Fergus." Elissa's voice is calm, but she shivers as her arms tighten around his body.

"You must stop  _doing_  this," he mutters, and she can feel how he shakes his head.

"What? Refusing to die decently?"

It's not until she's said it she realises  _what_  she has said, and where the words come from, and she winces as the images of Loghain flood her mind. She refuses to let them most of the time, refuses to be dragged down into the slump of useless thoughts that lead nowhere.

Fergus lets her go, his gaze now scrutinizing her as though he's searching for signs of damage on her face. Elissa smiles, thinking she has spent a lifetime in the months that have passed since they last saw each other. She has travelled with Loghain and built yet another life in Gwaren, then one here and then -

_No_.

"We tried to send reinforcements once we heard the darkspawn were headed towards Amaranthine," Fergus says, frowning.

"We?" Elissa asks.

"I," Fergus corrects himself, but it seems half-hearted and he quickly shrugs. A flicker of something slightly unsettled crosses his features. "Cauthrien has been advising me, of course."

"Of course."

Elissa throws Cauthrien a glance; she is talking to a stable boy, still holding the reins of her horse while she shoulders a saddlebag. If she has heard what they are talking about, she shows no signs of it. It's strange, thinking about her in a different way –  _such_  a different way, if Elissa's premonitions from back in Denerim are in fact true – and in different circumstances. For all her brother's generous taste in women, Elissa has never thought he would ever appreciate someone like Cauthrien. There's a hardness to her that reminds Elissa of herself and not at all of the soft-spoken, plump barmaids and servants her brother had spent his youth drooling over - nor the woman he had eventually married.

Perhaps, she thinks, stifling the urge to stroke his arm, it's easier with someone who doesn't remind him of the past.

Perhaps she's reading too much into everything.

"The Mother's forces would have outnumbered us no matter how many men you sent," she says instead, leading them across the courtyard and up towards the keep. She notices how her brother looks at the ruined parts – they are difficult to miss, the glaring holes in the silhouette – but he doesn't mention them and Elissa doesn't, either.

"The Mother?"

"Darkspawn," she says, wondering how you explain a broodmother to someone who isn't a Warden. "She was their leader."

"Huh." Fergus nods, thoughtful.

They wait for Cauthrien to catch up. When she does, Elissa presses her hand in a greeting that seems to fall in between both roles and habits but it  _has_  been a while since they last saw each other; Cauthrien's hand is dry and calloused and her expression somewhat grim.

"Commander," she says with a nod.

"Cauthrien." Elissa nods back. "It's good to see you."

Fergus smiles, his gaze wandering between them for a while before they make their way inside; Elissa walks in the middle of the two guests, a flurry of unfinished thoughts in her head and another beat in her chest, the change of company striking something deep inside.

"We have done our best to restore what could be restored," she explains, gesturing towards the massive building. "It's going quite well. We've had a lot of support from the lords and ladies."

"Indeed?" Fergus snorts.

"Actually, yes." Elissa has been sceptical and surprised for the past two weeks, but the nobility has been reasonably good to her, in ways she could not have foreseen – despite Loghain, despite  _Howe_ , despite the choices and decisions that affected their lives even when Elissa had not intended for that to happen.

"Have you heard from Loghain?" The expression on Cauthrien's face becomes visibly darker as she looks at Elissa, something trying to break through the composure.

Elissa is shuffling through her thoughts, as she has become used to doing as far as Loghain is concerned, thinking stupidly that she is transparent, that everybody can read her emotions on her skin. Of course they cannot. She has perfect mastery of herself and she is nothing if not sensible. Well, most of the time.

"I have, yes."

"Oh?"

"I had a letter," Elissa says. "A while ago now."

"Where did they send him? Do you know?" Cauthrien's tone is still as dark as her expression.

"Montsimmard."

"Is he staying there?" Fergus asks, opening the door to the throne room like he is a lord of the estate, rather than a guest. Elissa is about to mention it but rights herself, reminded once more that these times erases boundaries, if nothing else.

"I don't think so." She sighs. "I... don't know."

She  _doesn't_  know. In fact, she has absolutely no idea if Loghain is even alive or if he has been captured or deported somewhere or if the unknown darkspawn threat has had something else entirely in store for him. They know next to nothing thus far and recently, the messengers haven't been spotted anywhere within Ferelden's borders. All these tiny fragments are hardly more than guesses, scattered over various threads in her mind but offering no answers, only further questions; Elissa is so bloody tired of being forced to  _guess_  the course of action that every conversation bringing this up feels like a personal insult.

"So what are you planning?" Cauthrien asks.

"I'm still undecided," Elissa replies, which is some sort of half-truth, at least. She is still undecided about certain things.

Cauthrien raises an eyebrow, but she doesn't pick up the question again.

Elissa spots Leonie at the other end of the throne room, sitting at a table with Sigrun and Anders and Nathaniel who has risen to his feet and observes Fergus with what appears to be a peculiar blend of apprehension and interest. Looking over his shoulder at Elissa and Cauthrien, Fergus frowns.

"That's Nathaniel  _Howe_?"

"I told you he was with the Wardens, did I not?" Elissa realises she might not have, and tries to scramble through her recollection of letters sent with no luck. Her correspondence over the past few months has been scant and mostly consisted of brief reports even Loghain would find sparse.

But Fergus has already moved out of earshot, curious as always, and Elissa is still standing in the doorway with Cauthrien.

The throne room isn't what it used to be. It was one of the last lines of defence, as the Vigil finally gave way to the attacking darkspawn after nearly a week of valiant fighting, one that Elissa and the others had made it back in time to help defend. Before they had driven off the last stragglers of the horde, one of the emissaries had launched an enormous glyph of fire and poison right into the remaining silverite-clad soldiers and the room, Elissa recalls with a grimace, had all but exploded. It had taken every bit of Anders' strength to counter that spell and for a few hours afterwards, Elissa was certain he was going to perish from the exhaustion. It had hit her surprisingly hard, the idea of losing him.

She had lost Velanna. She had lost countless knights and soldiers and freemen volunteering to fight under the Hero of Ferelden. She had lost almost everyone but a dozen of battered soldiers and Varel who had led the troop who fought and reclaimed the outer gates and Oghren, who crawled out of the ruins like a cat going on his ninth life.

Elissa is struck by an unexpected desire to talk to Cauthrien about it, about the  _loss_  of it all, because she figures Cauthrien would understand. But the words don't find their way out of her so they are quiet together instead, for quite some time. Quiet and motionless, like statues – roles desperately unsuited to their tempers, Elissa thinks and snorts to herself.

"You are going to Orlais." Cauthrien's voice is low, toneless; she doesn't  _ask_. She already knows, Elissa realises, because Cauthrien is used to life and death and and the awful,  _impossible_  scales and probably knows, too, about the things that might upset them.

There's a moment of silence filling up the air between them, a trail of fragility and doubt, and Elissa looks out over the room. All things considered, it might even be more fruitful to throw herself on an outreached sword than going to Orlais to investigate the turmoil with little besides her handfuls of nothing to aid her.  _No. No doubts._ Shaking her head she blows out her breath in a rough sort of sigh and fastens her gaze somewhere beyond all the people in front of her. Their faces are so familiar now, after these past two weeks when they have been each other's everything as the dreary events have shuffled them close together. Their fates are running in circles around her own.

"Yes." Elissa gives her a brief glance. "Of course I am."

.

.

* * *

.

.

There are ghosts in Orlais.

At least that is what they feel like, the quiet shadows in Loghain's mind, simmering and surfacing at the moments when he is alone in the crowds, estranged by language and choice. He is not the only one who doesn't speak the Orlesian tongue – the Order has converged Wardens from all over Thedas lately – and he is not usually left to his own devices either. They don't trust him enough for that.

But even so he has hardly spoken to anyone in weeks and his longest conversations take place in his mind, in his memories and imagination, where he finds his threads of thoughts slowly spinning around the absences of allies.

He speaks to Maric, as always. Speaks to him of the bloody awful nation that keeps him prisoner, the suspicions and doubts Loghain has accumulated since they crossed the border; speaks of the political implications of everything and the lack of answers to his own questions; he speaks of Ferelden and West Hill and Denerim – even of Anora and the royal heir, when he's had one mug of ale too many.

He speaks to Rowan, too, about war and strategy and choices. She would find the Order badly organised, he thinks with a smirk.

During the many hours spent travelling, walking or riding through the vast fields that are framing the Imperial Highway, he tells Celia about the ridiculous culture and absurd customs of the locals.

He doesn't speak to Elissa. The memory of her is too bright, too near; she is a silent mark at the back of his mind, a flutter in his breath and a slow, steady rhythm in his blood –  _their_  blood.

He doesn't speak to Elissa and he isn't  _going_  to because she is bloody well not a ghost.

Instead he writes to her from an inn right outside the city walls of Montsimmard. It's his second letter and in it he's telling her that some of the Wardens are going to Verchiel while he is remaining in Montsimmard with the Antivans and the aggressive dwarf, Dvalinn. He writes that the darkspawn are under control for the moment but that there have been alarming reports from Verchiel and Lydes; he writes that he still doesn't know why he has been summoned or by  _whom_  and that the First Warden is rumoured to be dead.

Perhaps she already knows and perhaps his letters are lost in the turmoil of the Thaw, but he writes anyway, to calm himself as much as anything else.

He has learned lately that news travel slowly and with great difficulty even with Wardens messengers. Stories of war are told at the inns along the roads, exchanged for mugs of ale and bowls of stew; as Loghain and the others come to rest in the evenings, along the highway between Val Firmin and Montsimmard, they listen to the travelling men and women who carry tales over the borders.

"They say the keep in Amaranthine fell to the darkspawn."

Someone occasionally takes the time to translate the stories – tonight it's the Antivan Warden-Commander, slumped down beside Loghain at the table.

"And the Wardens?" Loghain asks, his voice hard as stone. He should have stayed in Ferelden, he thinks for a fraction of a second, before he bans such pointless regret. From what he hears of the events occurring there it's not as though his presence would have made a difference either.

"I don't know yet." The Antivan shakes his head. "Some of them are said to have led the battle for the city itself, leaving the fortress undefended."

"Did the city fall too?"

"No." The Antivan reaches for his goblet of wine. "Don't ask me why they decided not to burn it. It was overrun. But from what they tell us, the Warden-Commander managed to save it."

"Yes." Loghain nods, feeling the relief rushing in over him, seeping into his words and softening them. "That sounds like her."

There's a long stretch of silence as they drink, any further comments on the situation in Ferelden efficiently being swallowed up by the noise of the crowd around their table, the crescendo of tired Wardens relaxing after a day's duty. It is rare to reach conclusions here, with information as scattered as the bandits along the road – they get rumours and stories and sometimes even reports but they cannot make much of them. Val Royeaux is far away, so is Ferelden. And so, Loghain has learned, is Antiva where the Order has been driven to the verge of extinction or forced to flee.

The plan, as he understands it, is to make their way to the capital to meet the others who have been coming to Orlais from all across Thedas. He tries not to think of this plan in terms of good or bad since he has no power to change it. They want him to learn humility. He tries to bow his head and silence his hatred, to right himself and merge into the ranks where he is  _nobody_  and yet somehow also the sum of everything he has ever done.

He tries to remind himself of this that night as he rests in his bed – he is in no hurry to  _sleep_  in the company of Orlesians – when his mind races, as though it expects battle.

The following morning, they are attacked.

.  
.

 


	2. Not for victory

_Not for victory_

_but for the day's work done_

**Te deum - Charles Reznikoff**

.

* * *

Ferelden greets them with hoar frost.

It's as befitting their return as anything, Loghain supposes, as they slowly but surely make their way from the ship to dry, icy land. They've suffered a couple of losses over the past few days but nothing unexpected, mostly a handful of the most severely injured Wardens.

Beside him, Elissa is quiet and hard like the winters in the North, observing their surroundings with a grimness that has lasted since she first ordered their retreat. There had been little else to  _do_  save dying like animals, but she had only reluctantly accepted it, the anger boiling around the insight still visible in her expression. It echoes in him; he can all but taste the ashes of her disappointment in his own mouth, the way it mingles with relief and selfishness.

"You risked a great deal going to Orlais," he says in a slow, careful voice. He means  _everything_ but knows that such dramatic statements rub his commander the wrong way and close all angles for further discussion and there is too much to talk about at present to needlessly prickle her ego and wound her pride.

"Yes," Elissa concedes. She sounds distant.

He inhales, impatience like a surge in him.

"That was incredibly foolish and rash, even for you," he blurts, too quickly. He feels strained to the very border of his own capacity and tired far beyond its limits; recent events that are still tearing at his momentum - not to mention recent  _years_ that have left him out of practice as far as coaxing goes. Cailan had always deserved much less subtlety than his father. "The risk was too great."

Something hard and red-hot flashes in her eyes. "No."

Loghain looks straight ahead. They sit in a carriage making its way from the coast to Vigil's Keep, huddled up among their belongings and still carrying the marks of travel and battle on their skins. As Elissa shifts in her seat and he moves a little to give her more room, their twin shadows slide against the walls, wavering somewhat before coming to rest again. He exhales, trying to get rid of the sensation of standing on the verge of an avalanche, reaching for thin air.

"Leaving Ferelden open to invasion-" he begins. It feels, even to himself, like a bad imitation of the man he used to be. It's evident by the glint in his commander's eyes that she agrees.

"Yes, instead of defending my country with a dozen untrained Wardens at my back, I decided to seek answers to a myriad of questions," she snaps. "I will not apologise for that. Nor will I apologise for answering the call for help from a fellow Warden."

Fellow Wardens, Loghain thinks, suddenly even more tired. He still has all the names in his mouth – names of allies and enemies, of prisoners and captors – and the memories of prison cells and his own scattered thoughts.

 _Orlesian prison cells_ , he had thought.  _How drearily fitting._

 _Trust the bloody Orlesians to wreak havoc even within their own country_ , he had thought, carefully misremembering his own recent history.

 _Damn you, Maric_ , he had thought, bitterly.  _If you had only endured on that damn throne none of this would have happened.  
_

He'd heard voices through all kinds of layers – pain, delusion, exhaustion – and one of them had been hers, as dark and angry as he had remembered it.  _You've captured my general. Why? T_ hen, much later her voice had been a breath away, just over his ear, hot and heavy and cracked:  _don't you dare leave me now._

He hadn't. Though he can't take much pride in that since his continued existence is more a result of healing magic – and possibly some old-fashioned Fereldan sturdiness - than his own survival skills.

As far as rescue mission goes, Elissa's had been near perfection. From what she has told him during the journey back – in the rare, fleeting moments they have had to themselves – she had already helped the Orlesian lieutenant defeat the rebelling fraction of the Orlesian Order and bring about some kind of fragile truce. Loghain and the others who had been held captive in a fort near Montsimmard had been  _on the way home_ as she puts it.

Loghain is uncertain whether or not he believes her. There's a stubbornness in her that rivals his own and he has not been above lying about similar missions in his past, he thinks, watching her now. Perhaps it doesn't matter. A jolt of warmth thaws his profound sense of annoyed  _dread_ as he realises that they are actually in Ferelden again. That he did not need to die like a dog among Orlesians. That for all the odds that state that they – and Loghain in particular - will die rather soon, it did not have to be just  _yet_.

That she had, in every sense of the word,  _saved_ him.

"You wasted no time in Orlais, at least," he offers. He means it as a compliment on her strategic mind but it comes out of his mouth as a condescending rebuke. His time alone in that cell has not done wonders to his already rusty grasp of politeness and common curtsy. In addition he feels a frayed sort of frustration with his own contradictory ideas and impressions. Part of him is furious with her for marching across the border; another part of him admires her resolute response to a horrible situation. She has done well; she should never have come.

A good night's sleep in a proper bed, he tells himself. That's what he needs to sort it all out. And a bath.

Elissa gives him a long glance, raking a hand through her hair and crossing her legs. There's a strain in her face that he does not like, shades of too much responsibility and too much care. She has told him once in a half-drunken state that she is selfish enough to survive all of this, that she nurses the spoiled brat in her heart so that she will never be the selfless martyr of goodness her role might demand of her. It's difficult to believe her, difficult to even try.

"Leonie quickly managed to get aid from the Antivans," she says. "They received her letters and had already begun investigating the news about the First Warden themselves."

Naturally they would have. As would the scarce Fereldan Wardens, had they known. Loghain might have advised against it – lines are removed and maps redrawn, even his heart has shown signs of alteration, but he has shed blood for Ferelden for so long it's become a habit he cannot break himself of and he is nothing if not stubborn – but that's what they would have done, all the same.

He finds a certain grace in that thought now, watching Amaranthine appear in the distance.

There is, he has often thought over these past two years, a freedom in the chalice the Wardens offer. It's not without darkness, nor is it unconditional. Freedom never is. Yet the fact remains that nothing besides joining this woman's Order would have offered him such a respite from his former life, his past. Here, sensing the taut lines and too-sharp angles of the Warden-Commander's body against his own contours again, he is reminded of the truths of this life: that he's ensnared in a hopeless, wretched cause that will be the death of him but that he is no longer  _trapped_.

He looks at the packs on the floor of the carriage, the way they seem to swallow every empty space.  _I've taken most records I could find_ she had told him as they were boarding the ship back to Ferelden, shouldering a large sack of what apparently is recruiting records and old journals kept by the Wardens in the cities she had been to.  _The Orlesians start an armed conflict, I steal their stuff. It's only fair._

Loghain smiles inwardly at the memory.

Despite having travelled together since Montsimmard, he's not yet adjusted to her presence and the effect it has on him is both painfully familiar and strange at once. All these blurred distinctions between them, everything she has  _become_. His memory seems unwilling to reach as far back as those days before he left Amaranthine and today Loghain is too tired for it anyway.

All he knows here and now is that it had seemed simpler then, perhaps because it was.

He had never expected to return.

"We're preparing for an unfathomable war," Elissa says; her face is turned away from him. He doesn't have to look at her to know that her gaze is as dark as her words. "Though it still appears to be far away."

"War often appears that way, regardless," he says, suddenly older than he cares to think about. "But in this case I believe you are right."

"We should make the most of the time we have then."

Loghain has been planning ahead for a while already, his mind willing and obedient in these matters no matter how tired his body is.  _You look to war for comfort,_ Maric had told him once, despairing. Loghain had protested – still protests at the memory – but it had been futile given the way his life had spun out.  _War is constant_ , he had told the king.  _Only fools and children believe it isn't._

"I agree," he says. "Preparation is a rare luxury."

Elissa makes a low grunt, an amused sound that cuts right through the direness of the conversation. When he looks at her he notices that she smiles; it is the first time he has seen her do so since he left Amaranthine many months ago and the sight of it lands somewhere in his chest.

"Only you would use a word like that when speaking of war," she says, her voice rendered soft by the lingering smile.

.

.

.

.

The carriage moves even slower than time has during the past few months.

It seems like the snowed-in landscape – the reason they are travelling the short distance tucked into this means of transportation in the first place – is holding fast, resisting travellers and natives alike. As though the arling has closed itself around its own wrecked state. She wonders if the cold at least has frozen the straggling darkspawn hordes to death, if it has offered that small mercy.

Then again, Orlais has taught her that darkspawn – even the talking, plotting kind that makes her veins freeze in terror – are preferable if the alternative is Wardens turning on each other. Warriors, wardens,  _mages_. All these sodding mages and their blood magic, like filth creeping under her skin.

She had arrived to a country that bore no signs of war, a nation as prosperous and magnificent as she remembered it. Only in the Order did she find a trail of that destruction that had wiped out Leonie's whole group of Wardens. Only underground, in the shadows, had she begun to make some sense of it all.

Perhaps  _sense_ is the wrong word, she thinks now, folding her sore arms across her chest and tipping her head back against the seat. There's little sense in bargains with the enemy; she would have thought hundreds of years filled with stories of wars being lost to ill-advised compromises or for that matter tales of mages being ensnared by demons had driven that point home. Apparently not. Even some of her own companions had thought the Architect made a good proposal, after all. That recollection is an angry flutter in her veins, a constant protest.

The conflict is settled for the moment at least – a brief, partial solution to a chaos that seems to be as wide and vast as Thedas and as erratic as all the mages in Tevinter. Elissa can't suppress a shudder at the thought.

 _The earth is rumbling_ , someone had told her.  _Something is coming._

 _It's already begun in the Free Marches_ , someone else echoes in her memory.  _The veil is being torn, the wounds are opening._

Unfathomable war, indeed.

It shames her to admit it even to herself, but one of the recurring threads running in her mind as they had fought their way across southern Orlais had been that she doesn't want to do it alone. This war, when it comes, it will wreck them all apart. Deep down that is her belief. It's a bone-hard and pitch-black conviction containing very little hope but she also knows that no matter the premises and regardless of the odds, she will stand ready when she has to, with an army at her back and a sword in her hand. This is what she does; she fights to the death.

War has branded itself into her life; it's her past and her future and a song in her blood. If she had ever hoped for a respite of the kind Alistair would always speak of –  _one day this will be over_ , he had told her over campfires and whispered to her in his tent and she had thought  _please don't make promises, please don't make promises, please_ until it hurt – she lost that last scrap of faith after the Blight.

It doesn't end. It shifts and alters and spins around but duty doesn't  _end_.

She doesn't want to do it alone.

"I didn't risk too much," she says matter of factly, aware that it's glaringly obvious she has been turning this over in her head since he first accused her of it. She says it quietly, her voice a mere mutter. "I was  _very_ careful not to risk the Order. It was all sorted out. The only life I placed in any kind of danger by going inside that fort was my own."

" _Yes_ ," Loghain says pointedly,  _wearily._

"I thought you were  _dead._ "

"Then your strategy was all the more rash and foolish," Loghain retorts but his words lack the hard edges from before.

Exasperated, Elissa snorts as she glances sideways at him, looking at him properly for the first time in what seems like an eternity - or at the very least a lifetime. Being a Warden seems to do just that: age her several years in just a few months, causing unrest in her body. She wonders if it does the same to him. He sits up straight in the carriage, hands resting on his thighs, a posture of self-control and momentum. His face is just like she remembers it – neutral, stern, composed except for those precious moments when he slips and she sees through him; there are traces of Orlais there, making him look thinner and more worn, older. It causes a flurry of concern, sharp little twists and turns that make her throat tighten.

She's somewhat out of her depth here, still, but there's a new certainty between them now, a fixed mark of something –  _anything -_ deeply rooted in the tapestry of her mind. He's  _there_. It's the sameness she longs for she thinks at times, the shared experience that breaches every difference and shapes a little world of its own, with its own set of borders. The gap between the man she knows and the life which has been mapped out for him intrigues her, at times because it mirrors her own life, at times because it absolutely does  _not_.

There are no words to express that so instead she moves her hand over his, the thick leather of her gloves warm against the steel gauntlets he wears. They both look down and when she lifts her gaze upwards, Loghain meets it, holds it for a very long time as though he is looking for something.

"Tomorrow we can start setting our course for the near future," Elissa says, because it's always been an easy escape for both of them. Strategy. It holds back and  _contains_ and she loves it, helplessly.

He nods; her hand is still cupping his. "If the Vigil still stands."

The Vigil still stands.

As they approach, the massive sprawl of it against the sky seems almost  _excessive_ , like it has grown in their absence, its shadow hanging even darker over the arling it's built to protect. But Elissa finds that she likes it that way. Perhaps it's merely testament to the fact that she has been away for so long, but there's something grand about Amaranthine, something comfortingly stoic about a city that survives itself, time and time again. The Orlesians could not temper it, the darkspawn could not destroy it and every year the storms of the Waking Sea do their best to wreck the walls, but to no avail.

When the carriage stops on the grounds and she spots all the people who are waiting outside to greet them, Elissa allows herself to be swept away by a torrent of half-finished, exhausted thoughts all ending in an overwhelming sense of being  _home_.

She looks at Loghain again and there's a hint of something similar in his face as he nods, briefly, and lets go of her hand.

The rest of the carriages come to halt around their own as Elissa takes a deep breath and steps out on the grounds of Vigil's keep for the first time in seven months.

 _Home_ , she thinks again. Such as it is.

If not for the welcoming party standing out here in the biting cold she would hardly remember the title she carries around these days, she realises as the guards and the servants greet her formally. Her past seems so distant, especially the slices of it she had never cared for in the first place. But here, in front of these people, she is the Arlessa of Amaranthine and the Commander of the Grey and she takes a deep, steadying breath as she steps into the formalities of her roles.

"These Wardens are new additions to our forces." She looks at the familiar faces, smiles briefly at Sigrun and Varel, the latter probably already counting the spare rooms in his head. "Most of them were stationed in Lydes, now they'll stay with us."

No one asks about the circumstances; there will be time for explanations tomorrow. Elissa turns to the group travelling with her.

"This is our keep." She gestures towards the grounds ahead of them. "Direct any practical matters to Seneschal Varel and any other questions to Nathaniel."

Nathaniel nods, curtly but with decidedly less vehemence than she can recall. She had suspected it would either do him good or break him once and for all to be left in charge and she looks at Varel who gives her a glance that tells her that she had been correct. It's good, this way he will be of use to her.

"Welcome to Amaranthine," she finishes, adding a smile for good measure though she feels more inclined to proceed inside and find somewhere to sit down for a very long time. "Come, don't let us linger in the cold."

A collective murmur rises from the wardens behind her and the ones in front of her, reminding her briefly of the way darkpawn sing in low, wordless sounds.

"Commander, it's good to see you," Varel says as they all make their way across the snowy courtyard. "We worried when we didn't receive any reports from Jader, but you changed your route, didn't you?"

Elissa glances over her shoulder at Loghain who walks a few steps behind her, seemingly in a discussion with Sigrun.

"I made some adjustments, yes." She frowns a little as she spots the beginning of a brand new building beside the barracks. "You made adjustments here as well, I see."

"It was my idea," Nathaniel says and there's that blend of defensiveness and irritation that she remembers, if slightly subdued these days. "The Vigil is home to Wardens, after all. The idea is that our numbers will grow, I take it?"

"Indeed. I'm certain you made good decisions. You can tell me all about it later."

He gives her a wary look of someone who is trying to determine the reason behind the words rather than the meaning of the words themselves. Relax, she thinks irritably in her head but she doesn't say it.

"Reconstruction aside, did anything important happen while I was away?" Elissa asks instead when they're inside the great hall, having escaped the cold at long last. Her eyes are on the fires burning in the fireplaces, wishing herself near one of them.

"Yes." Sigrun suddenly stands before them, hands on her hips. There's a new kind of seriousness at the bottom of her gaze – nothing worse than experience, Elissa hopes, a new life to drown out her old one – as their eyes meet for a moment. Beside her, Anders shifts uncomfortably. "Of  _course_ it did."

Elissa gives Loghain a hasty glance, before turning back to the dwarf.

"We can talk further once you have had a hot meal and some wine, Commander," Varel interrupts before she has time to ask Sigrun to elaborate. "For now, I believe we ought to welcome you home."

.

.

* * *

_**A/N:** The wiki tells me Varel dies defending the Keep. I had absolutely no memory of that from any playthrough so I decided it doesn't happen. Ignorance is bliss and all that. Besides, if Anders can survive despite, you know, dying, so can Varel._


	3. Modus vivendi

Loghain wonders if anyone has ever given him a warmer, more eager welcome than Dog who's currently barking happily, two steps ahead of him. He's been following in their footsteps like a shadow since they stepped out of their carriage and his enthusiasm has yet to wane. The only thing that seems to disturb the dog is the fact that he cannot always be with  _both_ Loghain and Elissa as they must tend to separate duties and sleep in vastly different parts of the keep.

In all honesty Dog isn't the only one who finds  _that_ part frustrating, Loghain concludes when they've been in Amaranthine for several days and he has yet to spend one moment alone with the commander. But this is of course how it is.

There is much to do, plenty of matters that they can occupy themselves with and part of him is glad for the distractions. However trivial they may appear, each and every one of them serves as a gradual shift back to comfortable routines. Returning to his old life proves to be a task in itself; he's been gone for a while and his place in this old keep had never been a clear one to begin with.

In some ways he is an obstacle here, he thinks, watching the Commander go about her daily chores. He brought nothing but misery to these parts of Ferelden and lords and ladies rarely forget even the smallest vexation – they hold grudges for not receiving invitations to formal events, the ghost of Celia reminds him in his head, surely you understand that they will never forget a civil war.

Returning, he is reminded once more of everything he cannot undo.

He's reminded, too, of the tension and trouble he could cause Elissa.

Vigil's Keep may have been given to the Wardens but to Loghain, it will always be clear that it's truly someone else's, that it's an old fortress already claimed by an arling full of people. He catches himself missing Gwaren of all the Maker-forsaken places in Ferelden. Back when he  _ought_ to have considered it home a little more often and with less indifference, he certainly couldn't muster up any warmer sentiments, but now he remembers the reconstruction work they had performed there, almost a year ago. There was a sense of restoration in those actions, he thinks now. A slow, certain way of mending what was broken. It surprises him to learn that he misses it.

Perhaps he merely misses a simpler time. That is what old men are wont to do, after all.

When he speaks to Elissa or holds her gaze across a room in this increasingly crowded keep he wonders if it's  _that_  he misses.  _Her_. There had been clearer lines between them then, their places and positions sharp and steady.

Here, things blur in a different way.

Most of the other Wardens leave him alone – some of them even seem to actively avoid him which is nothing unusual, of course. The dwarf they had found in Kal'Hirol, however, shows no such hesitation in his presence.

"Were you held hostage?" she asks the day after their homecoming; Loghain is going over recruiting records and reports of their recent Joinings and stifles a sigh. "By the Wardens?"

"Yes. For a little while."

"What did they want from you?"

She perches herself on a locked chest near his desk, observing him.

It's a good question, he thinks. Initially he had the impression of being there for information, had thought that the Wardens and the darkspawn who were working with them would interrogate him. About the Archdemon, the ritual, the marsh witch, about any trace of his inglorious recent history they could possibly have managed to find. Then they had gradually let him understand that their purpose was different, though it would be a lie to claim he knows precisely what they had wanted. When he tells the dwarf this, she nods.

"We studied a lot of old Warden journals while you were gone." She grins, as though digging into this inglorious order's history is what she considers entertainment. He may have underestimated her, if that is truly the case. "Some of them seemed, well, sodding  _mad_. Maybe they wrote them while they were drunk?"

She appears momentarily lost in this fantasy of hers.

"Did you have a point?" Loghain asks, putting down the documents on the desk again, in a pile that is slightly more organised than the one Elissa had made, though not by much. Through the window, he notices a large group of wardens approach; they're on their way to the keep from the barracks, which means supper is at hand.

"Not really." Sigrun shrugs. "Only that we found a few stories of Wardens who tried to make deals with the darkspawn. Like the one the Architect wanted the Commander to consider. Once, the Antivans almost agreed – they had been promised stability and military aid for their nation. At least that's what the records say."

"It seems to be a promise they hold dear."

"They wanted you to do the same?" She's even more intrigued now, sitting on the edge of the chest and not letting him out of her sight for a second.

Loghain nods. There seems to be little use in keeping secrets at this point.

Who would have thought he'd ever advocate the idea of uniting the nations of Thedas against the darkspawn – or any other threat for that matter? It had been a patently impossible concept to him and still is. But fate's sense of humour has proved itself twisted and dark ever since the Blight ran them over and left them grappling for high ground like little children playing at war. Now everything is impossible, yet it still happens.

"We discussed that. Nathaniel thought you'd make a deal with them. I told him you wouldn't." A grin splits Sigrun's face, then a shade of doubt creeps into it. "It probably wasn't very nice of us to make bets. Did they hurt you a lot?"

"No." He makes a dismissive half-gesture to go with his half-truth, getting to his feet. "You won your little bet, however."

Who would have thought he'd ever advocate the idea of uniting the nations of Thedas against the darkspawn – or any other threat for that matter? But fate's sense of humour has proven itself twisted and dark ever since the Blight ran them over and left them grappling for high ground like little children playing at war. Even those among them who had been forging battles for so long they could not remember a different life.

"Ha! I knew it." She heaves herself up and stands on the floor, legs wide apart and arms folded across her chest, like a statue. A statue with a smug look of victory colouring its face. "The commander and you are two of a kind."

"Don't tell her that. That's hardly a compliment."

"Oh?" Sigrun tilts her head, the corners of her mouth curled upwards. "Because you tried to kill her? I think she's moved past that. She was so heartbroken when you left, did you know? At one point she drank four bottles of wine by herself - she just kept going, no one could keep up. I thought she was even going to bed Anders, but I'm fairly certain she didn't.  _Shit_. She'd kill me if she knew I told you that."

"Then why did you?" he retorts, harsher than intended, feeling irrationally angry on Elissa's behalf and slightly uncomfortable with the implications about the mage though this is hardly the time or the place for it.

The dwarf pauses for a beat, apparently considering his question very seriously.

"She keeps too many secrets," she says eventually. "I think it's a surface tradition. Never telling anyone how you feel. That just doesn't make any  _sense_."

Once, not too long ago, she had asked if Loghain was Elissa's father, he recalls with the same annoyed twinge at the back of his mind as her words had invoked back then. A moment's cold clarity. Now they're tinged with the same streak of worry that accompany many of his meetings with his own daughter after the civil war – the knowledge that he's a disadvantage to be set aside yet she keeps insisting on protecting him, publicly defending him in deeds if not in words, stubbornly refusing to sever the ties.

"Some fine prize awaits you then?" he asks, to change the subject. Though she may be too nosy for her own good and ill-suited to the subtlety required for this kind of intimate existence among others, Loghain is rather fond of the dwarf girl. She fights with reckless abandon and seems unperturbed by surface life although it must be as foreign to her as anything he can possibly imagine. There's a raw strength in that, an irreverent sort of pride and toughness. "For winning the bet?"

"Oh. Yes." The dwarf looks a bit embarrassed for the first time. "It's a bit... private, so I don't think Nathaniel wants me to tell you what it is."

"Then by all means,  _don't_." His words come out as more of a exasperated groan than anything else, fuelled by a genuine desire  _not_ to know what private promises the dwarf and Howe's surly brat have given each other to pass time this long, cold winter.

"Right." Sigrun's surprised chuckle makes Loghain feel as old as the stones around them, but it's a passing sensation and quickly erased when the doors swing open and Elissa stands before them, surrounded by a dozen Wardens.

"It's time for supper," she declares, unceremoniously dropping her sword on the floor. The Wardens scatter around her, heading for the promised meal, without doubt and with no audible protests.

"You're all bloody," Sigrun observes, rather needlessly considering the frozen stains on the commander's face that flare up in an angry shade of dark red in the warmth and light of this room.

"We've cleared out a flock of Blight wolves nearby." Elissa slumps down on a chair and hoists her right leg to remove the heavy boot that lands beside her sword with a thud. She repeats the procedure with the other leg and adds another snow-clad boot to the pile. Loghain wonders briefly if the servants' work load has doubled through her presence alone; she remains one of the sloppiest, most careless people he has ever met. "Varel tells me the farmers have been complaining about them for weeks."

"We've killed well over fifty already," Sigrun says. "I think Rolan and Nathaniel have kept count."

Elissa frowns. "Huh. I wonder why they're so lively recently."

"There likely is an alpha wolf hiding in some lair," Loghain points out. "Do you want me to send scouts to investigate?"

She looks up, a few strands of sweaty hair falling into her eyes as she removes her hood. They have torn apart all the rules and their carefully drawn maps, but he  _is_ her general and they are back in Ferelden with Ferelden's duties and hopes to steer them so this is what they do. The expression on Elissa's face tells him she agrees.

"Yes." She nods and returns her attention to removing the bloody pieces of metal from her body. "Thank you."

When they're the only two Wardens remaining in the room, Loghain allows himself the freedom to watch her; it feels like a rare luxury or an indulgence he isn't certain he should give in to, but he does all the same. If he's being honest that, too, had found its way into the way their previous lives were organised.

"Blasted bloody  _winter_ ," his commander grunts to herself, shedding the breastplate with a little grimace. There's a half-healed injury on her chest, Loghain knows, wishing he didn't. When they left Orlais is had been a festering wound, holding no promise of healing smoothly. "It'll be the death of us."

"You're Fereldan," he points out, silently amused even if he knows better than to show it. Her sour tone is often merely a cover, hiding that dark stream of humour that he finds so ridiculously appealing, but today she's closed around her own misery, her skin an impenetrable armour.

Even so, or perhaps because of it, he find her very much the same woman as the one he left only because he was being dragged away. She's grim and gritty, ungraceful and  _magnificent_  and as he observes the way she sits back, dragging her hands back through her hair, he can feel a shift in the room when the thick fabric of old shadows and ghosts that he has always associated with her seem to be rendered transparent. There are times when Loghain watches the Commander of the Grey Warden and wonders if he has found a living, breathing looking glass because in the depths of her eyes he sees a young man who knelt before a king without a throne. He sees the king, too, in all his charismatic goodness. And the queen, firm and arrogant and  _unshakeable_.

In this room, during this shaky truce in their long war, he sees Elissa for the first time in a very long time. Shamefully long overdue he sees  _her_ , unattached to everything else, disentangled from the threads of his own life.

The older he gets, he finds that memories have a way of moving through him at the oddest of times; they're sharp and clear stabs of the past, the layers of time blending so seamlessly it often seems there is no difference between then and now.

But there is and she is currently giving him a questioning glance before slipping on a pair of leather boots and pulling a tunic over her head. With hands used to the motion she cleans herself up, wiping blood and sweat off her face with a damp towel that she promptly throws over the armour when she's done. She steps over her discarded belongings and heads towards the door – and the meal. Loghain follows, still watching her with that odd and rather pathetic desire to savour the moment coupled with an even odder sense of knowing something is wrong with her but not knowing exactly what.

" _What_?" she asks, appropriately but for a completely different reason. As she turns her head to look at him, something softens in her face and he can see the faint outlines of a smile buried there.

Loghain shakes his head, briefly. "Nothing."

.

.

* * *

.

.

The keep lives on the ebb and flow of the Warden's whereabouts and now more than ever the sense of old secrets overwhelmes her. Secrets of these old buildings – the old paths leading from the keep straight into to the very heart of darkness – and the old truths about the Order now counting the Vigil among its scarce resources.

It's a world of its own, Elissa thinks now as she braves the stiffly cold grounds, wrapped in a fur cloak. A silent place, sealed off from the rest of Thedas. A convent, or a cage.  _No one is being kept here against their will._

_Well_.

In her head she rattles off the names of the Orlesians to make them seem more real, wills them to belong here. Installing twenty new Wardens is more of a task than she would have imagined, though she had hardly imagined it at all until they had all been safely escorted to Amaranthine and there are moments when she regrets bringing them along.

They're becoming too many, she thinks irrationally these days, thinks it when she's on the verge of sleep or bleary from just waking up. It's too much, too many lives, too high a number.

She knows their names, barely, and she knows she can count on their loyalty. Beyond that she finds that she has no urgent need for further ties of friendship or obligation, wonders when she watches them in the dining hall in the mornings if she will ever feel closer to them than she does here and now, considering them mere currency in their war.  _Better some unknown Orlesians than honest Fereldan farmers._

It's a heavy thought, an ancient weight in her body.

The new bunch of Warden does, however, add  _life_ to the tired old stones, a notion of something  _new_  that seems to breathe between the restored walls and the half-mended history. The Howes of days past would likely even approve, Elissa thinks, when she remembers her history lessons. Not that their approval from beyond the grave means anything but there's a sense of rightness in it all the same.

Everything is frozen around them but there's a relenting softness in the air today, as though nature is offering a faint promise of spring around the corner. They deserve it after this cold, turbulent year that has ended in this snowy nightmare –  _Maker-forsaken cold_  as some people call it,  _worse than the sodding Blight_ others claim. Elissa looks over at the guards on duty and the handful of servants that remain here, struggling to maintain their obligations regardless of season or weather. Again, that dread creeps up her spine.

Too much, too  _many_.

Then she finally reaches the guard barracks where she is told Anders has taken up residency while she's been gone, quickening her steps as she approaches the door. Her body feels warm despite the cold, her mouth sticky and dry at the same time, her head  _swelling_ with each hour that passes.

He greets her in the doorway, as pale and sickly-looking as she feels, and shoves the door shut behind her before she's had time to even turn around. For a second they're face to face, pressed tight together by the small space in his quarters. Anders is the first to look away. There's a membrane of watchful fear around him, as though he waits for something to attack them.  _Weirder than usual_ , Nathaniel had said when she asked for his opinion. She's willing to give him right on that account at least.

"How have you been?" she asks without preamble, mostly because he doesn't give her the impression that their conversation will be a lengthy one and she has a badly nursed wound that makes her light-headed every time she raises her arms.

"Oh you know, darkspawn, nightmares, the tainted blood thing." His tone is forced, strained, but he tries to smile his most radiant smile even so.

Elissa leans against the desk that takes up most of the floor space that is not occupied by the bed. Anders stops in the middle of the room and stands there for a while, looking at her as though there are things he needs to say but he remains silent.

Of all the new recruits, he's the one that touches something in her. It's the streak of light in him, she thinks, that patch of goodness that could so easily be twisted into bitterness or cynicism or something darker still. The Circle, for all the good she assumes it must do, also creates mages unable to survive outside of it because they lack defences, lack experiences, lack everything that cannot be built from two empty hands and a lifetime of longing. Barren creatures always crave  _more_.

Anders, Elissa figures, must be about the same age as her but a string of escape attempts and a supposed list of romantic endeavours aside, he's hardly  _lived_. She feels an odd desire to protect him, though she isn't certain against what.

"I need your help," she says instead.

When she removes her tunic and sits on his desk wearing nothing but trousers and a breast band she half-expects him to make some remark, offer a trite innuendo, leer at least a little bit. The mage she remembers recruiting some months ago would have. But Anders merely leans closer, all dry hands and furrowed brow and a voice that sounds more serious than she can remember it.

"This is a fatal injury," he says.

"Oh."

The pain his gentle prodding causes is quite overwhelming and when he notices how hard she clutches the edge of the table, he relents, giving her a searching glance instead. "It smells of some sort of venom and... magic?"

Her throat dry and tight, Elissa nods. She hadn't expected it to be  _that_ dangerous, has put off having it examined for nearly a week now, after all. Poison and magic. A stupid combination, to be certain. There's a memory at the back of her mind of Arl Eamon and magical poisoning and she closes her eyes.

"Can you remove it?"

"I'm a mage, not a miracle worker."

"That's not very reassuring, you know." Elissa opens her eyes again, staring straight into Anders' midsection and praying silently that he wears smallclothes despite some stray remarks in her memory that suggest the opposite. She distracts herself by examining his belt which seems gaudy, even for a mage. It has runes engraved in the leather and green stones that look diamond-hard and glitter vaguely in the light that surrounds them.

Anders makes a sound that is caught half-way between a sigh and a grunt. "I know."

Then, without alerting her, he begins to heal her wound and for a little moment when everything spins and her chest makes an inward noise like it's tearing itself open, Elissa considers crying. She hasn't cried from physical pain since she woke up in Denerim with more scar tissue in the making than actual flesh from her neck down but this, she thinks and clenches her teeth, this is  _death_.

_You give a little bit of yourself to the person you're healing_ , Wynne says in her memory.  _It can be detrimental for a weak or inexperienced mage; this is why we train our healers rigorously in the Circle._  Elissa looks into Anders's eyes as his hands cover her wound and fills her with a dull pain that hums in her blood and seems to seep out into every part of her, singing to every inch of her body.

She looks into his eyes, anchors herself in him and in the stream of white light that floods out of his body and into hers. It makes a sound, the magic. A low, dwindling sound that -

_Blue_.

Elissa blinks once, twice, opens her mouth to ask about the shifting colour because Anders is glowing,  _crumbling_ in a light that doesn't seem anything like the healing magic she has become familiar with over the past two years. A blue glow around him bursts through the white light, tears it apart, boils beneath his skin and she has the instinct to push him away, her hands on his arms and her heart thumping loudly in her chest.

Then everything goes dark around her and when she can see again her wound has closed – though the corners remain angry and frayed – and Anders has turned his back on her, cradling his head in his hands and making a whimpering sound.

"Are you-" Elissa straightens up, looking down at her wound again. Her head has cleared up, the fever seems to be waning and Maker, she can lift her arms without risking a complete meltdown followed by serious head injury.

"You'll be fine."

"Good. Thank you." She takes a step in his direction, tries to look him in the eyes again. "Are you okay?"

"I'm sorry," Anders says hoarsely, turning away from her quickly as though she's a too-hot hearth. Reflexively she reaches for him, grabbing hold of the hem of his sleeve. For a fraction of a moment the air seems to still in anticipation, then Anders pulls away from her so forcefully that Elissa nearly loses her balance and has to grab hold of the desk again for support.

" _Anders_."

"I'm  _sorry_ ," he says again, sounding angry now. "I'm drained. I should... rest for a bit. Take the potions on my desk for the pain."

There are moments, Elissa thinks, watching Anders move further away from her in the small room. Rare moments when the layers of time and place seem to overlap, becoming momentarily transparent so that everything shines through them and nothing is left in the dark. Those are the moments when you ask important questions and receive answers that do not try to mask the truth.

Loghain in their camp outside Denerim, a burning nation as their backdrop.  _You tell me: what do you want?_

Fergus in what once was their home, his eyes dark fires that had found no escape.  _How?_

The outlines of Anders' back in front of her now, three steps and endless stretches of time separate them.  _What have you done?_

But Elissa doesn't speak as she heads for the door.

And the moment is gone, if it ever existed at all.

.

.

Judging by her dull headache and the unpleasant, blurry edges to her thoughts it ought to be bedtime, Elissa reflects as she sits in her office.

It's not. The afternoon light from the windows is still harsh and bright and  _cutting_.

"Commander," Varel says and a forcedly patient tone in his voice suggests he's been repeating her title a few times already.

Elissa blinks, lifting her gaze from the sweetened tea in front of her.  _Bed rest for a couple of days,_ Anders had told her in passing as they met in the throne room. When she thinks about that, her mind flickers back to the other scene with him this very morning. While she can't claim to be an expert on mages she has never seen one react to anything the way Anders had reacted and the possible reasons for it have wormed their way inside her head where they spin around, relentless and prodding.

"Yes?" she manages.

"As I was saying, there is some unrest among the Wardens. They talk."

"Recruits gossip worse than fishermen," Elissa sighs, echoing her father in a different life, speaking of guardsmen talking among themselves about things that had not concerned them.  _Is Lady Elissa to remain unmarried? Is she in some kind of predicament? Was she not to be sent to Gwaren after all?_

"That may be so." Varel raises an eyebrow. "But you have been back for six days without having held any kind of counsel even with your senior Wardens. They're growing suspicious."

She groans. "There's nothing to be suspicious  _about_."

"I know that, Commander. They don't, however."

The morning after their return, Elissa and Loghain had informed every Warden at Vigil's Keep of the conflict in Orlais – in brief explanations and with little room for speculation, but they had wanted to take the wrap off things as quickly as possible. Apparently it had not been enough. Of  _course_ it had not been enough, she reproaches herself. War breeds conflict, she should have been more forthcoming. Her own exhaustion should not be the scale on which she weighs possible ways to handle her soldiers, but she has been beyond tired since Orlais. At least Anders had managed to heal her - she makes a mental note to reward him in some subtle way that he won't brag too much about to miss entirely.

"Very well," she says. "Let them know that there will be a gathering tomorrow morning."

The seneschal nods. "I will take care of it."

"Thank you." She manages a smile, though she can feel the muscles in her face protest a bit at the effort. "Is that all?"

"Not yet, I'm afraid. His Majesty sends his regards and he wants you and Loghain to travel to Denerim as soon as your other duties allow." Varel hands over a letter marked with the royal seal. "I have no doubt that the visit is further explained in His Majesty's private correspondence to you, Commander."

"Right." She places the letter on top of the ever-growing pile of things she ought to take care of today or tonight or anywhere between now and tomorrow morning. "I'll have a reply ready before nightfall."

When he exits the room, Elissa sinks back in her chair and shuts her eyes, promising herself that she will merely take a brief moment's rest and then dig right into today's long list of tasks.

The next thing she knows, her neck feels like stone and her back is sore as though she's been walking for hours. It's dark around her. She looks up in an attempt to orient herself in these surroundings and realises that she's still at her desk, in the middle of her massive pile of work. The dark wood of the table is black in the dusk and the light from a door that's opening somewhere else settles against it in trembling, uneven patterns.

"Elissa," Loghain says behind her.

"What?" She tries to glance over her shoulder but the muscles in her neck protest wildly at the idea and instead she has to heave herself up straight, using her hands and arms. This is not worthy of the Commander of the Grey, she decides, squaring her shoulders somewhat. While the pain from her injury is mostly gone, it seems to have been replaced by a stiffness in her entire body.

Loghain walks up to the desk; she can feel the nearness of his body as it brushes against her arm and there's an instinct, base and quick and awkward like most of her long-denied needs, to reach out for him and hold on.

"I spoke to the mage," he says, leaning down over her, clearly intending to personally make sure she gets that bed rest the healer had ordered.

_May the Maker spit on Anders_ , she thinks but her anger is very efficiently interrupted by Loghain's arm around her waist, pulling her to her feet in one swift motion that reminds her of how strong he is. She leans heavily on him.

"He always exaggerates." Elissa wonders how her body can feel so immovable, how her limbs can be so indescribably weary that every step makes her wince.

"He didn't give me any details." There's a hint of irritation at that confession, she notices, and smiles inwardly. "Though I'm certain you are correct."

"Oh. Well, I'm in no danger." As though her body wishes to embarrass her further, her words are accompanied by a sudden wave of nausea that upsets what little momentum Loghain's aid has given her. "Just some aftermath of an injury."

"You slept through supper," he says pointedly.

She briefly considers showing him the magically mended flesh but he seems to be taking no interest in that at the moment, focusing solely on getting her to bed. And then, of course, the double meaning of  _that_ expression makes her chuckle, since she's still half-delirious from the potion-edged sleep and has the emotional maturity of a stable boy, according to Fergus.

Loghain frowns when she looks at him but he doesn't ask any questions. His face is so near, she thinks, curling her fingers harder around his shoulder; she remembers the way he tastes, the warm scent of his skin, the deep, hungry notes in the way he kisses.

They walk slowly through the corridor, one step at the time. He may be strong, but she's built like a warrior and made even heavier by her condition. When they reach her bedchamber, Loghain opens the door with his free hand, while keeping the other firm around her waist and Elissa grants herself the liberty of resting her forehead against the curve of his neck.

_Too much_. The thought fleets in and out of her head as he lowers her onto the bed and she all but protests by clinging to him, too long to pretend it doesn't happen.

It does happen.

She wants to remain in his embrace, chaste as it is, wants to drag him down over her and feel awake again,  _alive_. There are words in her mouth waiting to be spoken and she wants to say them now, with one foot in the Fade, because these kinds of words are a rare commodity between people like them who are built for battle, for war.

_Maker help me but I love you._

Too  _much_.

"If you do not remain in this bed, I will send Sigrun up here to knock you out." His voice is low, it dances against her skin and into her blood.

She smiles, eyes closed, already drifting back to sleep.

.  
.

 


	4. No rest in this world or beyond

The following night, they hold a meeting at the Vigil.

If the gathering that same morning had been for all Wardens, old and new, this one is less official and held in the upstairs hall, which is a smaller room and not intended for any big gatherings. Nathaniel had mentioned that this had been his family's sitting room once upon a time, before darkspawn and bottomless greed had destroyed the Howe bloodline. Perhaps it's because there are notions of their past lives lined up like a little string of pearls, but Elissa can  _see_ them in here. Whining little Thomas who never even dared to play with wooden swords; quiet, clever Delilah and Nathaniel, ever the sullen older brother who rarely, if ever, got along with Fergus.

She looks at him here, older and taller and broader of shoulder and not as insufferable, not now when duty and some scraps of trust have straightened his back. Varel tells her Nathaniel has been increasingly competent and enthusiastic in Elissa's absence.  _Maybe I'll go away for good_ , she had said, her pride slightly –  _absurdly_ \- wounded at the suggestion that the Wardens are doing better without her. Even so it's a comfort to her in these awful times. When the war outruns her and the Taint catches up with Loghain, someone can shoulder the responsibilities without cracking open under the weight. Carry them all forward.

 _I sound like father again_. She leans forward, elbows on the table, as she's reaching for the wine bottle to refill her cup. Then she takes a large mouthful and looks at the people around her. It's a small crowd, these people that she can trust. Apart from Loghain, there's Leonie, Nathaniel and Sigrun which seems like a depressingly tiny crowd compared to the one she surrounded herself with during the Blight. But those were scattered souls with a common goal - this, she tries to convince herself, is the Silver Order. She's heard Sigrun and Nathaniel make clever retorts about it, this name that has stuck since she ordered all Wardens and soldiers of the Keep to wear silverite armour.

Loghain had thought it a sensible investment, if she remembers correctly. Elissa gives him a quick glance and gathers herself once more.

"Let us begin then," she says.

"Yes." Nathaniel sits back, hands on his knees; his own wine is still untouched. Some people just don't take to drinking regardless of situation, she thinks grimly.

"If we may start at the beginning, Commander," Leonie half-asks, half-suggests.

"Please do." Sigrun chimes in, glancing quickly at Nathaniel. "I'm still confused and it's not because I've had too much ale."

Nathaniel doesn't respond to that but Elissa notices a shade of amusement in his face. Apparently miracles do happen and even Howes can find a sense of humour.

"As am I." Leonie offers a little smile, more natural and easy than anything Nathaniel could have managed. "When I came to Ferelden, all I knew was that my brothers and sisters had been attacked and killed and I was the only one who managed to get out alive."

 _Convenient_ , Loghain comments somewhere in a recent past, words swooped up in a torrent of sea-sickness, injuries and confusion. It must have been anything  _but_ convenient for Leonie; she can't remember if she ever found the time to correct him.

He's silent now at least, merely observes the Orlesian Warden with a neutral expression.

"We had been aware of an increasing number of conflicts within the Orlesian order," Leonie continues. "One of our mages in Lydes – a fantastic arcane warrior – had left us recently. She said she was going to Val Royeaux to seek some answers, to study magic. From what I gather, she joined forces with the Wardens who later came for us."

"The mage betrayed her Order then?" Loghain asks.

Leonie shrugs. "No. And yes. Jeanna believed in her cause."

"Indeed."

"Think what you will of her,  _brother_." A hardness creeps into Leonie's voice and Elissa feels a surge of sympathy for her; if she closes her eyes she can still see Leonie kneeling beside Jeanna's body in an abandoned Tevinter ruin outside Lydes, a place soaked in history and magic.  _The Old Gods still whisper to us_ , the mage had said, as blunt and brave as only dying can make you.  _May the Maker forgive you_ , Leonie had answered, drawing her blade.  _May the Maker show mercy._ It was only afterwards Elissa had understood that they had been lovers and she had felt sick then, the earth spinning horribly beneath her. "The group of Wardens she joined in Val Royeaux wanted to end the cycle of the Blights, this endless struggle of darkspawn and humans. They may hold different beliefs, but they're Wardens, too."

"We think we have identified two active fractions in the Orlesian Order," Elissa takes over, looking at Nathaniel and Sigrun, then at Loghain. "One of them being the Wardens sworn to the cause of collaborating with the darkspawn. They seem to have aimed for a world where there's no more taint or where everyone carries the taint. Which is what the Architect claimed that he wanted as well. End the conflict. Create a truce."

"We have studied those Orlesian Warden chronicles you mentioned before you left," Nathaniel says. "It seems the Architect we encountered once attempted to make his offer to the Orlesian Warden-Commander."

Loghain frowns. "I know of this."

"Yes. The journal we've read mentioned Ferelden. King Maric, even."

"Start from the beginning," Elissa says, reaching for a plate of pastries in front of her. She grabs two of them before passing it on to Sigrun. "Tell me everything you've learned about this Architect and those who met him before."

They talk until the candles have burned down to mere whispers of light and Elissa is acutely aware of the weight of her own eyelids.

"I can understand it, though." Sigrun looks contemplative, spinning an empty wine bottle between her hands. "It's just a circle, going on and on. Can't blame them for wanting it to end."

Battle-worn, Elissa thinks. She could see it in the Wardens they fought in Orlais too. The desperation, the stubborn conviction in their eyes and swords. The hopeless way in which they had, ultimately, wanted things to be  _different_.

 _There's no honour in this,_  a man had gasped, on his knees on the ground as she was driving her sword though him, and she had done it with her eyes open, thinking  _I know, brother, but the world_ _is a little short of honour._

She doesn't  _want_  to think like that. At times, especially recently, her own mind scares her. The dark edges to it, the sharp angles around each thought, the way she can feel the massive presence of those before her in every move she makes;  _sacrifice the few to protect the many_ , Riordan says in her memory but there's so much  _death_ and so little hope.

"This darkspawn general is dead now, however," Loghain cuts into her thoughts like a streak of cold clarity. She gives him a grateful look. "As are the Wardens in Orlais who were fighting for the same thing."

"Those we know about at least." Leonie nods.

She speaks the truth. The truth they have been offered at the moment, however. Like so many things, Elissa knows, it may as well be a mere string of misunderstandings and complications but they will have to solve the problems as they appear.  _Plan for the worst and hope for the best_ she thinks and her mind leaps to Loghain again.

"What is the other fraction, Commander?" Nathaniel takes a mouthful of wine, then folds his arms across his chest. Elissa has to blink, remind herself that they are not yet done with the conversation. She had already abandoned it in her head, snatched the remaining wine and found an unobserved spot for her and Loghain.  _Later. Definitely later._

The sigh Leonie lets out seems like a mirror of Elissa's own mood.

"It's more of a... scattered group," she says.

"That's the way they appear, at least," Elissa adds. "But they seem to have a connection to the Tevinter magisters."

"Mages," Nathaniel purses his mouth, looking uncannily like his father for half a heartbeat. Elissa looks away.

"Not just mages." She empties her cup of wine, looks up again. "It's more complicated than that. We think."

"Jeanna had ties to this sort of magic," Leonie says. "She often spoke of the origin of the darkspawn, said there are mages in Tevinter who have studied the subject for centuries."

"Of course there are." Loghain raises an eyebrow, sighing harsh in his throat.

"What do we know of the Order in Tevinter?" Nathaniel looks at Leonie who casts a glance at Elissa. They should know something at least, but since secrecy is one of the rare virtues among their brothers and sisters in arms, perhaps it's only to be expected to have empty hands and no leads.

"Not much," she has to concede, and catches Loghain's gaze. She knows he's irritated with the trackless, dubious ruin of their Order the same way he's always frustrated with incompetence and lack of organisation and somehow she finds it almost  _endearing_ now, sharing his thoughts on the matter. "Quite frankly, we do not know a lot about the Wardens in the Free Marches either."

"Join us in the darkness." Sigrun makes the trite old joke sound both tired and hopeless, but she braves a smile all the same.

"Yes. We need less mythology and more structure." Elissa stretches her legs, nodding gravely. "Leonie and I sent a large troop of Senior Wardens to Weisshaupt before we returned to Ferelden."

"Is that wise?" Sigrun looks surprised.

"It's no more foolish than anything else we could have done," Leonie replies; for a moment Elissa looks at her and they lock their gazes over the table where maps and journals frame their wine and bread, reminding Elissa of simpler times. Campfires and aching feet and the sole concern of how to slay an Archdemon occupying most of her thoughts and nightmares. Perhaps that would not count as simpler times for ordinary people, but Elissa has long given up on all chances of being counted among ordinary people. For her, that time has gradually come to represent simplicity.

"We've agreed on certain coded messages they will send us once they reach the fortress in Weisshaupt," Leonie explains.

"Different messages for all of them." Elissa glances sideways at Loghain who gives a small nod, a quiet approval she hadn't known she wanted until just now. There's a warmth settling at the pit of her stomach.

"You did well there," he says. "Save first-hand information, this is the best we can hope for at present."

"Tell me we're not headed for the Anderfels." Nathaniel gives Elissa a sceptical glare as though he secretly suspects her to have mapped out a route already, ordering them all on the endless journey to the heart of their Order.

She shakes her head. "I intend to remain in Ferelden for as long as I can. Now that we have sorted out the most pressing matters in Orlais."

"We hardly know what the future will bring," Leonie says. "But we found the Wardens who caused this so for the time being, we should be making every effort to fortify our own position."

It's the truth, Elissa thinks, once more. And at the same time there are hollows of lies in what they say. They had found the Wardens who turned on their brothers and sisters but not all of them; they have not followed the leads to every group of Wardens in all the nations of Thedas, have not found the roots of the issue and pulled them out, cut them off from whatever darkness that has spawned them. What she had felt in Orlais she still feels, the mistrust and fury spreading through her veins faster than any darkspawn blood.

 _The edge of Thedas seeps and bleeds_. It's a sentence that flutters through her as she twirls the empty cup between her hands, letting the smooth surface cool her palms.

There's always unrest after a Blight. Elissa had read Riordan's journals when they found them in Arl Eamon's estate once everything was over and Denerim smelled of lyrium and fire. They spoke of old beliefs, of blood rains and omens in the sky, of a kind of blind desperation outlining conflicts, wars, futile uproars. When there is nothing reasonable about life, people look to the Maker, to causes, to magic. A Blight wages a war on reason. It is one thing to accept that men kill other men for lands or thrones, another thing entirely to accept that ancient dragons rise from beneath the earth, wanting nothing more than wasteful destruction.

She had hoped in vain that this Order she had been forced into, would stand above such things but it doesn't and instead it's rotting from the inside.

 _You are being too drastic, sister_ , Leonie comforts in Elissa's memory; it's a grey memory, the two of them huddled up against the rain outside Montsimmard, against the futile hopes that it's over now, that they can rest. Elissa had not answered that the only form of rest that she could ever hope for was missing, possibly dead and that she could not stop until she knew that for certain. She had sat there with Leonie's firm body against her own and her own heart closed to everything else.

The wind outside the keep suddenly makes the windows clatter and something chilly passes through the room as though there's an opening in the stones somewhere. Elissa stifles a grimace, trying not to think of the many ways in which the restoration may have been unsuccessful.

"So what are our current orders, Commander?" Nathaniel's eyes are calm and searching, and he reminds her abruptly of her duties.

"We continue to hold the enemies at bay here in Ferelden," Elissa says, the word  _enemy_ nearly too wide and vast for her mouth. "I will send a few of our Orlesian Wardens to the south to oversee the recruiting there."

She had feared that this would be Loghain's own order for himself once they got back to Amaranthine. To return to Gwaren or to the recruitment effort elsewhere and she had already prepared an annoyed retort to his way of slipping through the chain of command with his supposed proposals. Splitting up the utterly tiny group of people she can trust seems a bad idea at present and she is not inclined to let anyone in this room out of her sight for too long. Loyalty is expensive in times like these.

Loghain had not suggested that, however. He has, as a matter of fact, not suggested anything thus far, merely awaited her orders like any other Warden and Elissa cannot tell whether she's relieved or suspicious as his current leniency. It merely seems to suit him badly.

"Are you going to remain at the Vigil, Commander?" Sigrun looks tired behind her oversized mug of ale.

Elissa nods. "For the time being. Loghain and I are travelling to Denerim as soon as the weather allows but I intend to return."

She makes a mental note to open Alistair's letter that had slipped straight out of her mind and into a large heap of work that she never got around to finish last night. With a little inward wince she remembers the thick cloud of exhaustion she had battled and how disoriented she had been even this morning as the servants came to fetch her. Her fingers travel almost subconsciously to the little bump on her skin that is the sole remain of her wound; in all her nightmares lately she succumbs to it.

"Good," Sigrun smiles. "It's more interesting with you around."

"We should also expect some Warden visitors shortly," Leonie adds. "Our brother Stroud has written and told us he wishes to discuss an expedition to the Deep Roads in the Free Marches."

As their long evening ebbs out into a rather companionable atmosphere and most questions have been answered, Leonie is the first to excuse herself.

"I need to fall asleep before Juliana and Dorthe return to the barracks," she says as she's pushing herself to her feet. The recent scars on her hands and in her face are glittering in the dusk. "They snore terribly, I'm afraid."

"Better than sleeping in the Deep Roads," Sigrun says brightly.

Her comment makes Leonie smile. "You have a point, sister."

They leave together; Nathaniel nods curtly towards Elissa and Loghain before he follows suit.

A slow, deep sigh leaves her body as she sits back in her chair and breathes for a few moments; smoothing out the flurry of thoughts and sentiments that the long meeting has brought.

Vigilance, she tells herself. Duty, vigilance, war. It's the nations on her map, the pieces of land stitched together to form a world, and it's her only choice. She is well aware of that.

She is also aware that in a choice between Loghain and her endless supply of responsibilities, her responsibilities must come first. There is no question. Though it seems absurd to not even be able to sit down alone with her general to plot a course for the near future. Or do other things that she barely dares to think about at  _all_ since they seem so far away, like events that unfolded themselves around the two of them and now have closed all borders, re-drawn the limits.

The last time she shared this old keep with him the walls had been unbroken and the rooms had not caved in around them. It had been a  _home_ then, shaped to comfort and resilience.

Now it's a fortress and she feels the difference in her bones.

"I left a bottle of Antivan brandy in here somewhere," she says to Loghain, finally letting her gaze linger on him for as long and as intently as she wants. It's been so long, she cannot look at him  _enough_ and the realisation that it seems entirely mutual nearly makes her breathless. "You want to finish it with me."

He raises an eyebrow; the corners of his mouth are twitching. "That was not a question."

"No." She rummages around in a cupboard near the bookshelf. Back in Highever, Fergus had taught her early on to always hide secret belongings – stolen food, bottles of wine and the illustrated copy of  _Thief of Virtue_ that Elissa had pilfered from her mother's personal library - in remote chambers of the castle, or in places no one would think to search. "Should it have been?"

"Perhaps not."

"Good," she says triumphantly as she holds up the bottle and looks at him over her shoulder. There's more brandy left in it than she remembers.

"We ought to plan a better defence for the arling," Loghain says; there's a rustling noise outlining his words. When she looks over her shoulder she sees him clean up the stacks on the table and she smiles hastily to herself. He's tidy, which has always surprised her and still does. "I spoke to the seneschal, he tells me the southern border is still much too weak."

"We should definitely see to that." She returns to the table, bottle in one hand and two unused cups in the other. The dusk floods the room but her eyes have adjusted to it enough to notice the little things. His tucked-in smile, familiar and rare; the shape of his hands on the table, his hair that shifts in blue in this light, or lack thereof. When she hands him one cup and fills it up, her fingers brush over his own and she doesn't pull away; Loghain looks up, straight into her eyes and for a moment they remain like that, strangely  _intertwined_.

Being near him is a comfort and an unrest all at once, a low fluttering motion in her body. Perhaps that is how it is, how it should be - she doesn't claim to know and her own memories are full of fragments of stolen moments: campfires, lakes, tender words and Alistair's heartbreaking honesty colliding with her own steely resolve.

This is not even remotely similar; it's a different world altogether, drawn on different maps.

"We should also do something about your location," she continues when Loghain doesn't press on with the subject of how to defend the southern border. "You're my second, there is no need for you to sleep in the barracks."

"Wardens don't have those kinds of ranks," he reminds her.

Elissa sighs and knocks back her brandy. "I do." With another sigh, she adds: "I want you closer."

His face softens at that, though he does not speak. He takes a mouthful of his drink and observes her in silence.

They both know that caution is a necessity, that his debts to Ferelden haven't been paid, that no matter how much blood they both shed for this country, it will always demand a bit more. The old ways and stone-carved traditions, generation after generation of people not budging an inch in the face of change. There are many out there who would still oppose her as arlessa, regardless of how many darkspawn hordes she keeps at bay, regardless of the sacrifices the Wardens have made for this nation's future. For the time being, with her heroic grace still somewhat intact and the new king's support shining bright like a beacon, she is untouchable.

But it's fragile, her armour. It will not take a great deal to wreck it: a misstep, a move in the wrong direction, a couple of years without the immediate threat of a Blight to keep the population grateful towards those who know how to fight it.

She has a feeling the years to come will etch several handfuls of dark stains on the silverite.

Just as Elissa reaches for the bottle again, inching closer to Loghain to refill his drink, there's footsteps outside the door. Instinctively, they both pull away their hands and straighten up in their seats, waiting for the knock.

"Yes?" Elissa says, her tone sharper than she intended. "Come in."

"I'm sorry to disturb you at this hour, Commander." Varel stands in the doorway, dark and stern like a bad omen. She feels something tighten in her chest, her body immediately snapping shut, becoming steel around her blood and heart.

"What's the matter?"

The seneschal looks at her, then at Loghain. "There's a situation not far from here."

"A situation?" Loghain stands up, falling so easily into the familiar patterns of duty and readiness that it seems everything else in his life is rare coincidence and extravagant luxury. It's almost disheartening to watch. Shrugging away the weight of that thought, Elissa stands too.

"Darkspawn?" she asks.

Varel nods, but there's no certainty in his face. "Five Wardens have been found dead, Commander. It's... they claim it looks like a massacre."


	5. The art of defeat

The forest outside Amaranthine is deserted, except for the small group huddled beneath a large oak, looking straight ahead at the scene that seems even more cruel now with the stillness as a sharp contrast.

All evidence point to the same conclusion, harsh as it is: that it had been an ambush, that there had been no balance, no  _equality_  in the fighting and that these dead men and women, Elissa thinks as she spots another wrecked body in the corner or her eye, had been slaughtered with a purpose. It seems that purpose had been no less than blind rage and her throat feels dry and sore in the cold, her feet wet from standing still for so long.

"Rolan," the seneschal says when he examines the first body they see. It's maimed but familiar. "He recently joined."

Varel coughs twice; Loghain kneels down beside one of the corpses and turns the body around. One of the Orlesian wardens, she can tell as much. By his side there's another, wrapped in heavy armour. She remembers the red hair, the sheer volume of it.

"No animal did this," he concludes needlessly. Then he leans to the side to pick something up from the red-patterned snow and for a second Elissa cannot press air down her lungs because she recognises his finding within heartbeats, recognises its place and its owner. It's a belt decorated with runes and stones, a belt she had seen when she was last healed at the keep, when she had felt but been to tired to acknowledge that something was wrong.

_What have you done?_

"No animal, but perhaps a blood mage," she says and her voice doesn't quite feel like her own. A chill has planted itself in it, spreading out to every word and settling in her gut, like determination or fear. There's a taste of iron in her mouth. She should have foreseen this. She should have prevented this. She should have  _known_.  _Maker curse all mages and their powers._ "That belt belongs to Anders."

Both men look up at her with various degrees of concern displayed on their faces - Varel is the first to speak.

"Are you certain, Commander?"

_No_.

Elissa nods. There are other possibilities, of course there are. Versions, different paths, different truths. But she knows all the same that this is what has happened. Knows it beyond reason in the shadowed parts of her consciousness where all the bad vibes and chilling fears reside and she thinks  _you should have seen it coming; you should have watched the mage at your back_ , shivering suddenly beneath her layers of clothes.

"Anders." Varel speaks the name slowly, trying out its weight in regards to this deed, perhaps. Or trying to convince himself.

With a sigh, Loghain rises to his full length and walks up to her again, still holding out the belt as though he wants her to examine it more closely. She averts her eyes, takes a step to the left. When she looks back at him again she notices the line on his forehead that is always visible whenever he's irritated or concerned and something in her chest tightens; since Varel is looking in a different direction she dares to place one hand briefly on Loghain's arm but says nothing else.

"What now?" he asks a moment later.

Around them the night is silent. Elissa tilts her head back, desperate for another sight, another scene but even the stars seem cold and detached now. Staring down at them with the Maker's eye.  _What hath man's sin wrought?_

"We dispose of the bodies."

"Commander-" The seneschal nods towards the body slung into a tree. "If I'm not mistaken that is a Templar."

"There are two more templars over here," Loghain says, nodding towards an unlit spot between a bush and a tree. Elissa walks closer to where he's standing, almost despite herself.

She looks down at the frozen blood splashed across the snow and the torn-up twigs and mud that are scattered all around them. As though nature has tried to resist.

"Regardless," she manages. "This is a Warden concern. I'm reluctant to notify the Chantry at this point. It is  _my_  concern."

Dog barks from far away, having grown tired of the bloodied bodies she's forbidden him to have his way with. Varel gives her a sympathetic look. "Not yours alone."

Someone in Orlais – she no longer remembers whom – told her he found the Order simple to manage largely because of its isolation from the world. Their warriors join with no strings attached to live and die by the sword and their deaths are meant to be no more than small collections of blood and bones. Elissa shudders. Becoming greater than you were before does not seem so tempting if it decimates all of your worth.  _Ever_   _the_   _noble_ , Loghain says in her head.

She shoots him a glance where he stands among the slaughtered wardens; the shadows and shapes above him transform his face slightly, alters his features against the landscape and she wants to alter them back, wants him  _unchangeable_. Like steel.

After they have burned the bodies – the fire turning into a beacon in the night sky, a sign of every horrible thing that will surely follow this make-shift burial and Elissa mumbles the Chant of Light over and over again as though it would keep anything at bay – there is little point in lingering. One group of templars of unknown origin, five wardens that should have been sleeping soundly at the Vigil. Too many names she doesn't know, has not had time to learn.

They gave up their lives to become wardens but they did not give them up to be murdered in a sodding forest far from home. Elissa curls her hands to fists inside her gloves. When she swallows she can taste bile and ashes.

Every step back to the keep feels like a chore, part of an endless, pointless strategy.

"None of this can be said to be your fault." Loghain's voice is precise and steady like the sound of his footsteps on the covered ground. He walks close, the two of them a few steps ahead of Varel and the mabari. She wants to believe him, she wants to turn it back against him, she wants to have nothing more to do with any matter like this one ever again; the shape of it is cutting into the fabrics of her mind.

"Can it not?"

"No," he says simply, searching for her gaze but Elissa averts her eyes.

Truth is she had left Amaranthine in the wake of a terrible attack, the broken keep not even half-way restored yet as she had stormed off to fight another war elsewhere. What did she leave her wardens with, what manner of order had she offered them? In her head now she chants their names that she has to make up, thinking they can at least be allowed to matter after their deaths if not prior to it.

_May the Maker watch your step until we meet again._

Her thoughts almost stumble on the phrases these days. Maybe they're trying to force themselves out of her, find a different path in a different being where the devoted faith doesn't  _chafe_  as much.

The three of them walk the rest of the distance without speaking, a silent troop casting long shadows upon the white surface.

.

.  
.

"Let's take the wraps of this." Elissa sits in her office, not much later. There's a goblet of warm spicy tea in front of her and a plate with bread and cheese on the side but she doubts she will be able to swallow any of it for a long while. "What was that  _about_? Why Anders? What happened here while I was away?"

The seneschal clears his throat.

"I'm afraid we know very little of any conflict that may have led to this," he says after some consideration. "Anders kept to himself quite a lot. There is not much to divulge."

Even if she believes his honesty it's the wrong answer and does nothing to brighten her mood.

"What's a templar doing poking around here in the first place?" Elissa speaks loudly, angrily; her voice is a whip in the otherwise silent room. "The Chantry has no business with the Grey Wardens."

"Someone seems to have alerted the templars all the same, Commander."

"Evidently, yes. But why?" She looks at Loghain, then back at Varel."Anders is my warden, he's no apostate."

There's a dark fury at the edges of her mind, the same kind of anger that had directed her to Orlais. She feels it now like a hiss in her thoughts –  _this is my territory, stay away_ – and has to concentrate on breathing slowly to calm herself down. It feels lately as if she's losing grasp of the slice of the world that has been deemed hers to steer and that feeling is a dark, looming threat in her every thought.

"Does it matter what he  _is_?" Loghain keeps his own voice sombre but there's hardness in his eyes as he meets her gaze and Elissa remembers bodies on the ground, slung over a branch in a nearby tree - bodies torn apart and distorted beyond all limits.

_Yes_ , she wishes to say.  _You know that very well_. But she shrugs instead.

"I suppose not. Regardless, this is a matter that will not become known outside this room." A few deep, thorough breaths and the energy that had left her in the forest returns to fortify her decision. "No good will come from telling the other Wardens. As far as they know, Anders ran off. That is what he does."

Part of her wishes they had found Anders's body among the others in the forest. It would have been awful but it would have closed the circle. Now, instead, it's an open wound.

"Understood." Varel nods briefly. It's hard to say, Elissa thinks, whether or not he agrees with her.

"A wise choice," Loghain says and a verdict coming from him, at least, is a verdict she can trust.

.

.  
.

One of the scarce benefits of the recent attacks on the keep, Elissa concludes at supper that same evening, is that the old decorations have given way to new ones. Grim old portraits of generations of Howes gone - Nathaniel has kept them somewhere, she's certain of it, likely made a shrine in one of the spare rooms, kneeling before it in angry prayer - and replaced by colourful needlework and assorted paintings. The Vigil's interior had not been on her mind back when she was first summoned here and certainly not after that, either, but now she notices changes to it as everything is still cast in a different light since her return.

If she could just be granted a few uncomplicated days of  _rest_.

She can feel the lack of sleep like a dull throbbing in her temples and behind her eyes, a jarring sense of not being quite as sharp as necessary. She can feel it as a hardness in her bones, a ruthless focus.

It's that ancient way of reducing the world until it's simple enough, reducing her wardens to numbers and strategies and herself to a commander because she can't count the empty beds without flinching.  _The Hero of Ferelden is not used to defeats_ , she had overheard Varel say to Loghain just recently, when neither of the men had spotted her in the next room. She hadn't lingered to hear Logahin's response; she cannot stand the thought of being belittled, not by him.

"That girl is most definitely not a recruit." Elissa frowns, looking at a child seated comfortably between Sigrun and one of the Orlesian wardens, Haldouin, who had joined her in Montsimmard. His stern face seems oddly bright as the girl tells him something, gesturing wildly with her hands. Judging by Elissa's not-too-vast experience she'd say the girl is five, maybe six years of age.

"Her family died in the attack," Varel says, as he puts his goblet down. "Farmers, from what I gathered. Anders found her in the village. She was injured so he brought her back here. It seems she's taken a liking to Sigrun."

It seems he's right about that. The girl leans close in that same way Oren would do, sliding up against Elissa's side with sticky child-hands and breathless discoveries to share.  _Your dog killed a chicken, auntie._ His thatch of unruly hair, impossibly scented with everything from mud to cinnamon and roses. _Can you tell me about werewolves again._

"We're not an orphanage." Elissa grabs a slice of bread and focuses on dipping it into the thick broth instead of watching the scene in front of her. "She can't stay here."

"I'm afraid the orphanage was destroyed by the darkspawn horde." Varel gives her a curt nod, seems to wait for her to say anything in response to that and when she doesn't he clenches his jaw. It's not difficult at all to imagine his face just like this when Arl Howe had demoted him for disobedience. "Her name is Kesla."

:

:  
.

After supper there's a gathering in the chantry that Loghain attends without really wanting to but because his absence would be noticed more than his indifferent shape in the crowd, he goes.

He hasn't yet begun counting Orlesian numbers or morphed them into their own, will not start now. Even so the scene from the forest has planted itself inside his every thought and he finds that it leaves him unsettled in several ways. The apostate had not been among the dead. Not as far as they could tell – and he sincerely trusts the judgement and attention to detail of both Varel and Elissa - and not  _likely_ , either.

Magic has never terrified him. That thread of fear that runs through every myth and cautionary tale involving mages has usually left him cold. Like so many other things in his life it comes back to the occupation, he presumes, growing up under the boot of Orlesian lords who could crush your back on a whim, magic or not, you learn to fear swords, staffs, words and fists alike.

But this mage. Anders. There is something about him – inane and childish in his memories though the force of his healing spells had been beyond comparison – that differs. An edge or a glimpse of something, he isn't sure what exactly. He only knows that as he stands at the warden service surrounded by soldiers he feels a tremble in his own composure.

Later, he makes his way to the upper floor of the keep where the commander has her chambers and thinks about abominations and apostates, trying to trace down the source of his discomfort to no avail.

Loghain doesn't enter Elissa's chambers but he can still see her well enough behind her desk, with the fireplace as a dramatic backdrop. When she looks up from her writing, her face is pale and her mouth a taut line.  _Betrayal_ , he knows with a sudden clarity burning like a flame inside his chest. This is the root, the source of everything. They hold each other upright at the point of balance in this place, their order based on strict honour and responsibility - even more so since it largely lacks hierarchies.

He finds, unsurprisingly, that he can shrug off the deed itself, gruesome as it had been. Desperation is always ugly and he has seen enough of it to be mostly numb to its effects. But the foolish mage has betrayed the commander's trust and this, Loghain finds that he cannot forgive.  _Oh, how ironic_ , Maric mocks in his head.

"We have a child living here, did you know?" Elissa raises an inquiring eyebrow.

"I have noticed."

The girl had been terrified by the mabari last night, had screamed so loud it had awoken Loghain from an almost decent slumber and forced him to get up to see what the fuss had been about. She had all but set off towards him before stopping short, probably realising she was afraid of him, too. A wide-eyed, scrawny little thing. Tough, he presumes – at least when she isn't surprised by strangers or dogs twice her size. It takes a fighter to survive your whole family like that.

"I was going to dismiss her. Give her ten silvers and tell her to run off to Amaranthine." Elissa's voice is hard as steel but distinctly hollow, as though she has no strength left to fill it with. "Varel looked at me like I had been possessed by Howe's ghost."

She laughs suddenly, a joyless bark of a laughter. "Maybe he's right."

"You are merely exhausted," Loghain says.

"I'm not sure what I am."

"Fortunately, I am." He remains in the doorway and looks at her as she's frowning back at him, her face suddenly without pretences and masks and he is reminded how it affects him when he hears a noise behind him.

It's Sigrun who stands there, arms folded across her chest. "Why do people talk about sending our orphan away?"

"Sigrun," Elissa sighs. "This is not a good time."

The dwarf ignores all hints and pushes past Loghain until she stands by the desk, leaning across it to get a closer look at her commander.

"You're smart, Commander. Well, for a noble."

" _What_ -" Elissa begins and the indignation in her voice is impossible not to hear. Despite everything, Loghain has to hide a grin at the dwarf's remark. Old habits die hard even if he himself has been a noble far longer than he was ever a commoner. But those are merely titles; you never change heart, however, and he's no more a lord now than when he was on all fours in the mud, harvesting beets until his hands ached.

Sigrun shakes her head so fervently her whole upper body shakes, too. "But this is sodding  _mad_."

"I will return later, Commander," Loghain excuses himself, knowing better than to be pulled into conversations where he can never win.

.

.  
.

When he returns, the night is thick around the keep.

She is in her bedchamber, he can sense as much. The door is ajar and through the opening he can see her, clad in no more than a tunic, sprawled out among parchments and books on the bed. It's a scene that paints her younger, he thinks with that lurching feeling in his chest. A young woman propped up on her elbows, legs dangling over the edge.

"You are still working," he says, realising it isn't much of a question and as far as statements goes it is rather flat.

"There's always something to do. You of all people should know that."

She doesn't look up, as though she fears doing so will steal a precious moment of concentration that she can never repossess. It's a form of madness, working this hard. He wonders briefly how many times he has been found in this very situation by Maric, by Rowan, by Cauthrien and - at times when he neglected everything outside of his work for the King- even by Celia.

His own reply makes him feel old. "I, of all people, do."

Loghain observes her. Since his return to Ferelden he has been less certain about a lot of things but what he does know he knows with a clarity that nearly stuns him. He knows that he can't stay behind the borders of the nation he has given everything he has to give; he knows that Thedas will burn and that his commander must be there to mend it when it does; he knows that he is a Warden now; he knows that this is  _all_  he is.

It's not his war. He won't live to see it through, he has very little hope of that and not because he believes in imminent demise but because he feels certain the war will rage on for decades. Perhaps Elissa won't see the end of it either but he still leaves it in her hands.  _The Hero of Ferelden is not used to defeats,_  the seneschal had said to him before. Loghain had sneered at that.

_She has lost everything_ , he had replied.  _And what she did not lose, she willingly gave up._

That is how you learn the mythology and reality of defeat. That is the  _only_  way to learn it. He knows it better than most.

Her eyes flash now, irritation and frustration in them; there's hot anger in her voice. "Did you have a reason for your visit?"

"You need to rest." He says it simply, yet it's also an echo from his own history that reverberates against the walls in here. Time is just a circle. This he knows, too.

"I have not appointed you my nursemaid, now have I?"

Loghain feels his mouth curl into a smirk. "Not that I am aware of."

Something in her face alters as she notices his half-grin and suddenly she puts the book down, turns her head so he can no longer see her. Her next words are nothing but parts of a drawn-out sigh.

"Forgive me," she says under her breath, still not looking at him. "Perhaps we ought to look into that ghost, after all."

"I believe there are more rational explanations."

"For me behaving like a fool, you mean? Yes, you're right."

A quick glance at him over her shoulder, then she sits quiet for a long while and he remains where he is, trying to make out what she's been working on by looking at her books and parchments. The Warden records he can see. A book about blood magic and the Chantry. A handful of tomes with titles long gone. A map of the Free Marches.

"I just..." Her voice comes from somewhere far away, one hand raking through her hair as she speaks. "I don't want to lose anything else."

Loghain exhales.  _I want to lose nothing else_. He once told her that; he remembers. He had not understood back then how infinitely sad the words are, what vast hopelessness they can't even begin to cover.

"You will," he says, as gently as he possibly can.

Elissa's broad shoulders slump, her voice a heated whisper directed to the pillows and the wall. "I can't  _bear_  it."

"You can," he says.

There's no answer, though she turns her head and looks at him for a long time. Years ago, back in Denerim when that wildfire inside her had flashed in her eyes with every decision she made, she would have raised a more vocal protest. Petulance and passion –  _I shall make my own rules!_  Time and responsibility have tempered her since then and he knows all the layers of it, every shade.

Without preamble he walks into the room and lies down on the bed beside her.

She watches him intently as he removes the tomes and scrolls that separate them and puts them on the night stand. They don't speak.

His hand finds her waist and she's smaller than his memory of her, her curves slighter and her muscles harder. Loghain has a mind for details and a memory that never relents even as he grows older, yet he thinks sometimes that he would not be able to describe Elissa to someone who had never seen her before. He knows the  _feel_  of her, how she's fitted against his palms and his body; he is aware of what makes her laugh and what makes her curse; he holds a seemingly endless supply of knowledge of silly, trivial things she has told him; he knows the shape and sound of her voice and what she would say in a number of situations; he is less certain he would remember the colour of her eyes.

They're grey, he re-learns now as he inches closer to her and she looks at him, her lips parted as though she is going to speak.

She doesn't.

Instead her fingers brush away a strand of hair from his forehead, lingering there for a moment, making a path to his temples, his nose. A soft sigh escapes her as he lets the hand resting on her waist find its way under her tunic; Elissa undoes the fastening of his trousers and within seconds he feels her hand close around him, her palm warm and dry and sure.

It's the first time he touches her in months and even so he had not quite expected his own hunger nor her need that is mirrored in the way she takes him inside in one swift move, her free hand still stroking his face, fingertips ghosting over his jaw and cheeks – the pad of her thumb remaining for a long time over a recent scar on his chin.

They barely move. It's not the point, not the purpose and he is slightly surprised to find his body responding even to the stillness. She seems to melt a little into his embrace when she realises it, too. With his fingers entangled in her thatch of hair he lets out a deep, rugged breath as the soft motions of her hips pressed against his and the sensation of her mouth on his neck help him find release.

He  _loves_  her.

The thought has no edges of novelty in his mind, yet the words still seem foreign to him as they form themselves at the back of his tongue but stays in his mouth, unspoken. There is no right moment for his branch of love, he thinks at times, no point in wording something that is hardly a gift. Perhaps it's the mere shape of this love that confuses him. It is nothing like how he had once loved Rowan, with a stubborn desperation so common in one's youth – he has often thought that he would not have known what to do with her love if she had offered it to him in another context, if they had forged a life for themselves after the war. Whatever he felt for her had always seemed fixed to a particular time in his past, emotions destined to shape him but not to last. And there is nothing of his often too-quiet affection for Celia in the way he now thinks of Elissa. Nothing of the slow, meticulously dutiful process that had coloured his marriage until his wife had made her way into his heart, almost like a surprise to them both.

He loves her like he once loved Maric, the young king who had wrecked his life apart and offered him a purpose larger than his previous life, larger than himself.

He loves her, too, with the passion of someone who knows that this is the last time, the last chance, an old man's unrestrained love.

Elissa speaks his name suddenly, her voice a warm breath on his skin and her hand tracing some unknown pattern across his cheek. He looks at her, straight into her wide-open eyes as she tightens around his fingers, her mouth making the softest of sounds. Resting her forehead against his, her breath hot and damp on his skin, he feels her relax into his embrace, the curve of her body limp under his hands.

There is no distance left between their bodies, no breaches to their lines; he kisses her then, finally.

.

* * *


	6. This be the verse

The royal heir is born during the last snowstorm of the winter which, all things considered, is actually quite telling. It's been a cold, turbulent year after all -  _Maker-forsaken_  some say.  _Worse than the sodding Blight_  others claim.

The royal heir is born in the middle of a snowstorm and Loghain learns this much later, learns it at long last by the end of Drakonis when he reads his daughter's sparse and royal letter that finally reaches his hands after Orlais and the turmoil at the Vigil.

_The royal heir_. There's a streak of vindictiveness in him as he re-reads the message - it had often been implied in various subtle and unsubtle ways that Anora was barren, that she was unfit for the throne, that she was not quite deserving of Cailan Theirin with his family and his father's glorious name. It had, it seemed, always came back to the boorish general made teyrn. Even in Ferelden the nobility oppose change and he had never ceased bringing them just that. All things considered, neither had Maric, but he had a bloodline at his back.

"I think we should go to Denerim." Elissa sits opposite him at the table, her eyes curious and fixed on him while he reads. Her hand curls around the goblet and he catches a brief smile before she drinks. "The roads are decent now."

Loghain nods, looking at the letter again. "You knew?"

"Not until this morning."

At the back of his mind there's a chain of memories and hints suggesting this may not be a matter she wishes to discuss with him. They had been lovers, he knows. Elissa and Maric's son –  _lovers -_ and when he places the names together like that Loghain realises that he does not very much care to discuss it either.

"And so Calenhad's blood lives on," he says instead, as levelly as possible.

Elissa still looks at him. "Arl Eamon must be thrilled."

That makes him scoff into his own goblet and put the letter down at the table. The even, restrained hand-writing –  _look father, I can write my name now_ \- looks back up at him and he hasn't thought about his daughter for a long time now, hasn't given himself permission to miss her but he  _does_ , rather more passionately than he can admit.

Amid all the blighted chaos surrounding the Landsmeet it had pleased Loghain to find that Arl Eamon had not been even somewhat successful in his attempts at dethrone Anora and replace her with Bryce Cousland's daughter. The man might have been at the peak of his popularity then – aided, unfortunately, by Loghain's own foolish decision to try to render him powerless – but he had not been shining half as bright as Anora or the woman sitting in front of Loghain now, raising an eyebrow as she waits for his answer.

"He has his protégé on the throne, regardless."

"And Anora," she says, shrugging. If Loghain has raised a full-fledged court politician - for good or ill - Bryce had raised a general made for shoulder-barging the world into its place. The irony of that would certainly not be lost on the late Teyrn, either. "I doubt he is shrewd enough to rule through her."

"He is not," Loghain agrees.

There's a plate of baked cinnamon-coated winter apples between them on the table and he picks up a slice while Elissa has another serving of porridge; they eat in silence for a while, focused on little else. Outside the sky lights up completely, allowing the first rays of sunlight to break through the mist of dawn. Elissa leans forward suddenly, casting a quick look around the room before she offers him one of those rare and utterly  _thorough_  grins that he hasn't seen since before all this, before Amaranthine and Orlais gave her a burden that even Loghain would argue is too heavy for anyone.

It lands in his chest, that grin. He puts his half-eaten apple down, looking at her across the table.

"A grand-child,"she says then and her voice is tinged with something he can't determine the origin of - soft as silk and uncharacteristically gentle. She opens her mouth again as though she intends to add something more, but nothing comes out.

"Indeed," he replies, regretting it immediately because her comment merits a better answer.

A flickering shade of guilt comes over him when he thinks about said grand-child because it's Celia's grand-child and he's too damned  _old_  and this woman across the table is meant for more important matters, means far too much for far too many people for him to waste her time. He shakes his head, mostly to himself.

"What?" Elissa asks because she doesn't miss a beat and her frown tells him that her uncanny ability to sense his thoughts hasn't waned either.

A loud crashing noise interrupts any further attempt at conversation, however, and before either of them has risen to their feet to examine the reason for it, he can hear a somewhat familiar voice break out in laughter in the hallway.

"Sodding shields," Sigrun says. "I keep forgetting where they're placed."

"Third morning in a row now." Leonie's soft Orlesian accent is discernible through the rattle of metal being gathered on the stone floor. "You're on a roll."

As the voices draw nearer Elissa withdraws her hand and Loghain squares his shoulders, thinking how they are embarrassing themselves, acting like children caught in the act of their latest mischief. He has tried to convince himself that this relationship between them is an alliance of convenience and as such,  _excusable_. But it's slipping, that conviction. There's nothing pragmatic about his sentiments and wishes as far as Elissa is concerned; there is nothing  _necessary_  about a union that would wreck her reputation and cause a rift between her and her banns, spreading a dislike for their entire Order if they're unlucky. They are no freer now than they were a year ago but this wordlessly constructed union makes it easy to forget.

It's tempting to indulge oneself but he has never been very good at filtering his own greed through soothing lies.

The Orlesian commander plants herself on a chair beside Elissa and nods at Loghain, offering him a smile that clash against his gloomy thoughts.

"Good morning, brother."

"Good morning," he says, grateful for once for the crowded keep.

.

.  
.

Something substantial has changed between them, Elissa thinks as she watches Loghain hoist his pack into the carriage and climb up to take a seat beside it.

Naturally  _everything_  has over the past two years but ever since the night after Anders vanished, their pattern has transformed further still and she has not yet grasped in which ways. She doesn't think Loghain has, either.

Most days, or for the most part, they treat each other like any other two wardens would - work side by side or far apart, train, take their meals with the rest of the ranks in the dining hall and make little plans for anything beyond their shared duties. It happens on occasion that they share a smile or a meaningful glance over shared knowledge or frustration and Elissa feels close to him then, feels part of something intimate. Of all the people that walk the roads of Thedas, he is the one that has seen who she truly is, she is certain of it. In the evenings they continue their share of work while pretending not to notice how everyone else leave them alone. That's their unspoken oath: to make use of whatever convenient cover others create and to keep their wits about them.

And most mornings she wakes up to his breaths and heartbeats and his arms tight around her before they disentangle without preamble and go about their separate daily routines. They don't talk about this. Not in words and not in deeds. They never ask each other how long the bed they make together will hold them there or how in the Maker's name they'd unmake it, should it be necessary.

They never talk about it; it merely  _is_.

Elissa leans back, grabbing a pear from her pack and begins folding through the massive stack of letters she's brought. The Vigil has been in a sad state for weeks now and she's terribly behind.

They've received their first coded messages from Weisshaupt, arriving to confirm their fears and suspicions. The First Warden is indeed dead. So, it appears as other Senior Wardens add their letters to collection, are a lot of other wardens in the Anderfels.

_We are remaining here, Dale and I_ , Lorhann writes in his large, angry-looking handwriting. Elissa has a flash of memory where he fights beside her, short of statue and built like an ox and impossibly quick at the same time. He's a trustworthy man, she is as certain of it as she can possibly be.  _Send reinforcements at your leisure._

_Warden-Commander. I write to update you on my work, as agreed upon._

She'd recognise the letters from Soldier's Peak anywhere, she thinks as she unfolds the carefully folded paper. There's something old about the letters from the recovered keep, as though it matters very little who resides there and why since every inhabitant of the building must adhere to its rules rather than attempting to set new ones.

Elissa winces. She  _really_  doesn't like that place; it's a shudder at the back of her mind every time she remembers it. Avernus typically writes the same letter to her every time, with a few alterations depending on his successes or failures as he conducts his research. The hypotheses he wishes to test and ultimately prove are only ever implied, if that, and Elissa feels a vague sense of operating in the dark as far as permitting or disallowing his experimentation goes. When she had shown Loghain Avernus's request of making subjects out of Wardens approaching their Calling he had not, as she temporarily had thought, found the thought disturbing but rather shrugged and claimed the idea had some merit.  _What good will it do to rot in the Deep Roads when that time comes?_

Even now the reaction gets under her skin and she pushes it away, buries it along with the reasons why. Her next letter is from Val Chevin and the words from its Warden-Constable Blackwall are the perfect cutting blend of sharp criticism and professional interest and it nearly makes her smile to herself, despite the topic. There are inquires there about recruitment in Ferelden after the Blight, about the sudden and heavy increase of Wardens being shipped overseas.  _My original impression was that the Fifth Blight left Ferelden relatively unscathed, Commander? Yet this urgent mobilisation of our brothers and sisters tell a different story._ Blackwall questions her leadership, she can tell as much. On the other hand, Elissa has begun to question the entire order they both belong to as of late, so she can hardly blame him.

The reply she composes is polite but she makes use of everything her mother ever taught her about cutting one's opposition to shreds with daggers masked as words. He's done nothing to earn her trust yet.

"Stroud writes that he's unearthed several worrying signs of darkspawn corruption in the Free Marches," Loghain looks up from one of the letters in his lap. "He is heading for the Deep Roads to investigate."

Elissa thinks about it for a moment. "I've heard some rumours about Kirkwall in particular. Can it be related, you think?"

_The edge of Thedas seeps and bleeds._

"Impossible to say. I assume we will be notified if there's any relevant discoveries." Loghain returns to the pile of letters, unrolling another piece of parchment.

She reaches for her waterskin and takes a swig before doing the same thing; for the rest of the journey they sit like that, buried in work and only occasionally looking up at each other.

.

.  
.

The court is much like she remembers it.

Elissa had realised with merely minutes left until the city gates would appear outside the carriage that she probably should be wearing more suitable clothes than her travel tunic and favourite leather breeches. Luckily her years as a Warden on the run through the country has taught her nothing if not various ways in which to rapidly disguise herself and after a rummage through her pack, she had found a dress more fit for an informal audience with the King and Queen of Ferelden.

Naturally she still resembles a stable boy in comparison to Anora who threads the polished marble with a natural pride that could make anyone envious. Not that killing darkspawn require that much grace and smoothness, Elissa thinks to herself. But to each their own.

"Father." The Queen stops in front of Logahin, a warm smile rendering her face younger and softer. When she turns to Elissa the smile fades somewhat, though it's still there, still warm if more reservedly so. "Warden-Commander."

"Your Grace," Elissa says out of habit, even if there are very few formalities accompanying them today. Should rules guide them they would not be in the palace at all, not risking anything after these long years of battle and unrest. Amaranthine is bad enough, she has been forced to learn the names and habits of several disgruntled nobles and commoners already and though she's determinedly kept these facts from Loghain, she knows that he knows.

He is a complication in her life.

"Elissa." Alistair stands beside her now, grinning widely and she almost gives him a hug because of that simple, rare way he has of greeting a friend. If that is what they are once more. She rather hopes it is.

"The king of Ferelden," she says, mirroring his grin. Once, it would not have been a matter made for lofty jokes or stray remarks but on occasion war and the passing of time can mend even the farthest of distances between two people. "Where is your son?"

.

.  
.

"He looks very much like you, father."

Anora stands by the armchair where Loghain sits, holding a sleeping Duncan in his arms.  _Duncan_ , and the world stops for moment as he twitches in his sleep, raising a fist into the air and making a low murmuring sound.

"Yes, what are the odds," Alistair says dryly, though Elissa knows him well enough to discern a calm sort of acceptance behind the words. He would have wanted it differently, would have preferred to put a large barrier between himself and his father-in-law, but takes this fate in stride, as though he's  _finally_  relenting before the order of things.

He's a father now. The mere concept is absurd to her because this is Alistair who tried to keep them both going in the Deep Roads by making up tall tales and inventive myths about the Grey Wardens, who stomped out of every conversation she attempted to have with him after Landsmeet, Alistair who is King and a  _father_  and Elissa takes a deep breath.

The child is a sturdy sort – long feet, big head, thick hair that spreads out across Loghain's pale wrist now – and Elissa figures it might be a blessing for someone born to inherit Ferelden. She gathers from what Anora is telling them between the lines that Duncan will have no brothers or sisters so the burden will be his alone. Somewhere in her memories her mother laments the fact that Elissa will be the last child –  _can't bear the thought of it, Bryce, it breaks my heart -_ and it's a sliver of a thought that's been with her all her life. But her mother had not been a politician, nor raised by Ferelden's finest general so her strategies had all involved family relations.

In a way little Duncan fits seamlessly in Loghain's lap, the family traits like invisible chains around them and the small chest rising and falling in sync with the much larger one. In other ways there's such a heavy dissonance between two clashing realities in this chamber now, between all five of them, that Elissa struggles to rein in her own thoughts. The sight of Loghain there, his strong features and seasoned face blending with chubby baby limbs and that same impossibly dark hair; there's room for love in him, she can see it so clearly during times like these, yet it seems she will never truly be part of it, as though it has already taken place, back in another lifetime and everything since are merely reflections.

"What do you think of the name?" Anora asks, one of her hands resting softly on her son's belly.

"Maric would have approved."

Loghain looks up; they seem to study each other for an eternity and Elissa finds it difficult to take her eyes off them. Three generations, she thinks and the thought becomes twisted with grief even now. Her own line has ended before it even begun which is hardly fair.

"I would have thought so." The Queen smiles, a private smile that Elissa doesn't know if she's even meant to witness.

There's a very particular beauty in bonds not of our own choosing, a certain determination to them as opposed to the delicate, unfixed condition of romantic love. She used to have the former and scoff at the latter; these days she is unsure what she has and what else she can be granted.

"Excuse me," she says to no one in particular and slips out through the open door and into a palace corridor where the lights flickering on the walls and tables make the place feel warmer than it is. Looking down she can see goosebumps forming right above her wrists and on the skin on her bare forearms. It used to be soft as silk, she remembers someone telling her once, tongue wandering over her body. Now it's scarred, too.

Outside the chamber she's heading towards a window, like a moth seeking light. The guards are faced the other way so she feels almost alone where she stands, bringing her hands to her hair then to the back of her neck in an effort to soothe that restless flicker of sorrow that soars in her head.

It has been a long while. A lot has happened since last time she fell victim to the vague kind of longing that she feels now  _again_ , ensnaring her with its whispers of what could have been and what might have happened if only. If  _only_. Elissa exhales, a ragged breath that sounds more like a cough.

She feels a hand on her shoulder then and for a fraction of a second she thinks it's Loghain but as she turns around it's Alistair who stands there, inches away. It takes her a moment to turn the realisation over in her mind, remind herself that she shares the corruption with Alistair, too. It's a low song in her blood now, as subtle as it ever was.

"I'm fine," she says before he's had time to say anything to contradict that statement. It feels very important that he doesn't.

"Of course." He pauses for a beat.  _You always are_ , hangs outspoken in the air. His face is so  _kind_ , she had forgotten.

They start walking slowly through the mostly-silent corridor where all those generations of nobles are watching their steps. Queen Rowan to their right now, her smile not as radiant as Elissa remembers it from the painting she's seen before. The Warrior Queen. When she was a girl in Highever she would often wonder how anyone could give up riding through the wilds with an army at their back for anything in all of Thedas, could almost imagine the hungry longing for it if it ever got lost. Did Rowan feel the same, she wonders now. Did anyone ask?

Alistair begins to tell her about the portrait they've made of him since her last visit – it's a long, rambling tale intercepted with jokes and she smiles in all the right places and remembers to sound suitably interested and amused, just like old times.  _Just_  like old times.

"You're happy," she says when he's done and it's not even a question.

He nods all the same, smiling. "Are you?"

There's such a simplicity in his question, such casualness and yet Elissa can't remember the last time anyone has asked her this. Perhaps nobody ever  _has_  and the fact that it's Alistair of all people who does makes a certain kind of sense.

"In a manner of speaking," she says, glancing quickly at him. She doesn't want to lie and she doesn't want his concern. On occasion those two things mingle badly.  _  
_

Over the past few months, raging across foreign lands with a sense of dread building up inside her, she had enough time on her hands to imagine a future that in no way brought her any sense of contentment. She had pictured her order in utter ruin, seen the fragile shell of what she has rebuilt crushed again, mercilessly.

She had been convinced Loghain had been defeated as well and that had left a deep, dark wound in her fabric of thoughts; even now as she thinks about it, the anger fills her with a rare sort of determination. The fact that he isn't dead, that the keep actually is full of Wardens, old and new, has settled into her body as a solid comfort. They build their walls with bodies and conviction and pray that it will enough. It's all they can do. It's all anyone can ever do.

_Set your eyes on the horizon, pup,_  her father says in her head. _Do not look back, do not falter._

"What does that even mean? In  _what_  manner of speaking?" Alistair gives a little frown, obviously not satisfied with a cliché and a smile. "You're not a teyrn, you aren't allowed to sound like one."

Elissa chuckles. They've stopped in front of a gaudy chandelier that resembles the one Loghain once told her was Orlesian spoils of war that got left behind after the rebels had driven their oppressors out. She had secretly admired it then - she still does. When she looks at Alistair the curiousity is written all over his face.

Neither of them ever speaks of the life that could have been and almost were - a life that would have unfolded itself had she made a different choice. It's not a life she  _wants_  but she can feel the lack of it all the same, like a stitch in her chest, a tiny stab of something inexplicably gentle and unknown. She's not made for it but it happens, at times, that she wishes she was.

"I think I'm doing what I ought to be doing," she says, wondering if she ought to explain that there's happiness in that, the way she once would have. She has often underestimated him. It might be time to break herself out of that habit.

"I'm not sure I am." Alistair drags a finger over one of the branches of the chandelier. He doesn't seem unhappy about it, merely pensive. "But Anora is definitely in the right place, so it all works out, I suppose."

They don't speak of this, either, Elissa thinks. Her political scheming that had won him the throne and cost him these things they have soundly buried since then. His declarations of love against her strategies. Perhaps it's only fitting that she pays for that now. Wincing slightly, she pushes the conflicting emotions aside.

Alistair is still watching her, looking as though he wishes to ask her something but refrains. It has always been physically painful for her to keep secrets, has never agreed with her nature and it itches inside now, the desire to be blunt and crude, reveal everything he doesn't know about her life since they parted ways at the Landsmeet. Because she may have left him heartbroken in a palace he never wanted but she had not traded that life for a life in simplicity and there's been a thread of urgency in every word spoken between them since then, a desire to prove it.

Now she refrains, deciding that he must know by now. If he does not, no remark in all of Thedas can change his mind at any rate. Stubborn, infuriatingly idealistic man. She smiles a little to herself. Alistair is then, a drop of nostalgia and simplicity that is only rendered simple because it's so distant and always was.

Whereas Loghain, she realises as the chamber door opens and he walks out of his family reunion, is a fresh injury on skin already healed and scarred. For a moment, as she considers the fact that it might be the same for him as well, it feels like the hand that has been clamped around her lungs ever since they stepped into the palace loosens its grip.

"Is he back in Ferelden now?" Alistair's question feels sudden and at first Elissa barely knows what he means but his gaze is on Loghain. It's a surprisingly dispassionate gaze, as though he's opted for neutrality when he couldn't find it it himself to forgive and forget. It's probably better than the man in question deserves, at any rate, if she tries to be an objective bystander.

"For the time being." Alistair folds his arms across his chest and observes her as though he's about to make further comments about Loghain's whereabouts but Elissa forestalls him by offering her best smile and another cliché. "I'm afraid I must call it a night now. There's much to do tomorrow."

"Ah yes," he nods, and if he's disappointed in not getting a chance at discussing with her he doesn't show it. That heart on his sleeve has been refined and polished, Elissa thinks. She is no longer certain it can even be spotted. "I heard your brother is arriving early."

Once outside again, Elissa breathes early night-air with a familiar relief that floods her each time she is permitted to leave the palace or any similar estate, for that matter. Hers may have been a hard bargain and her victory has never been more than a bleak siege but she cannot help but feel that she has actually  _won_.

Not all cages are prisons, after all.

.  
.

 


	7. No other way to love

_I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,_  
 _I love you directly without problems or pride:_  
 _I love you like this because I know no other way to love_  
  
( **one hundred love sonnets: xvii**  – pablo neruda)

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:  
:

* * *

The following morning Denerim is covered in the first spring-rain of the season. A soft but overwhelmingly damp weather that forces people to run through the streets and take cover among the merchants and blacksmiths.

Not Elissa, however. She is standing in the garden of her brother's estate, calling out for Dog to return inside and Loghain watches them from the doorway. Even from that distance he can tell she's a bit annoyed, and not just with the dog.  _Rightfully_  annoyed, she corrects him in his head.

"Dog!" she barks. "Come here now, you wretched little creature!"

The mabari appears on cue, though not from the direction in which she's yelling but from behind the house; he's got wet dirt dripping from his fur and remains of dried flowers hanging from his mouth.

"Here boy," Loghain says, stepping aside to let the dog in. "Elissa, he's right here!"

It shouldn't be discernible from where he stands but he thinks he can hear a heavy sigh. When she walks back to the estate, her hair a helmet of heavy dark tendrils and her tunic completely soaked, she gives him a sideways glance that he can't fully interpret. He turns around and follows her inside as well, almost reluctant to leave the background noise of the city and trade it for the loud-voiced teyrn who had arrived a couple of hours earlier, bringing servants and horses and newly bought furniture.  _And here we were having some peace and quiet_ , Elissa had muttered, honest enough for the both of them.

He had also brought news of the larger scale: Fergus Cousland is to marry Ser Cauthrien by the end of Ferventis. A rushed wedding by all accounts and possibly an unpopular one, at that.

"He could have told me," Elissa says when they are alone in the dining hall. Her brother has business elsewhere for most of the day which feels like an odd relief. Loghain does not  _mind_  Fergus Cousland – he had even come to appreciate the man during his own stay in Highever last winter – but there's a certain pattern to this life that reminds him of all the aspects of a noble's life he least could endure. The social gatherings, the empty, meaningless positioning, the long days and even longer nights of words and letter-writing and very little action.

"I was under the impression he just did."

She bites down hard on a slice of bread and reaches for another one. "Naturally I meant he could have told me  _before_  he declared it to all of Ferelden."

Loghain stifles a sigh, then a smile because he finds her equally irritating and amusing in her current state. For someone so used to control, he knows from first-hand experience, it is certainly frustrating to merely watch as someone close set out a different course.

"You  _have_  been out of the country a lot," he points out.

Rumour has it that the Teyrn of Highever had not exactly been in a position that allowed him great freedom with the circumstances of his wedding. Loghain prefers not to dwell too much on that subject and the same goes for Elissa, it seems.  _Oh Fergus_ , she had muttered when presented with the very same rumour. Loghain had refrained from pointing out that through this disastrous way of arranging it, at least, Fergus has already made certain he will have heirs.

She sighs now, but her tone is lighter, almost warm. "Must you counter all my moping with pragmatism and reason?"

"Was that not why I was conscripted?"

This wrings a smile from her lips. "True enough, I suppose."

Loghain cannot force the current situation from his mind with banter, however. He keeps running in circles around the teyrn's choices and what they could mean for the future of Ferelden. By her eyes – searching and bottomless – he can tell Elissa keeps herself busy with the same sort of thoughts.

Cauthrien has, by all standards, fought hard and loyally enough to rise in society without ruffling too many feathers. Though she had been sworn to the usurper she had turned against him in the end, saving her skin and the nation in the process. These things will not, Loghain knows, be forgotten. What better moment to retreat from the military than after a civil war has been put to rest, after a damned Blight has ended? Nobody will blame her.

Even so it will hardly be a celebrated union of the same celebrated kind as Arl Justus and his shield maiden from the Free Marches, Arl Eamon and Isolde, Maric and Rowan. Ferelden wants its heroes.

It has been a few years now and Loghain still hear the nobles and barmaids whisper about Lady Elissa. Wouldn't she make a formidable Teyrna of Highever; doesn't she has the mind for it, the skill for it, the indisputable heroism for it?

Naturally they are right.

The most remarkable thing about naming her Arlessa of Amaranthine had been just that – while she once upon a time might have been considered an eccentric young woman too fond of battle training and too unconcerned with social events and appearance she's a hero now and a warrior to the bone and as such strongly capable of raising a lot of support. Not only had she ended the Blight, she had also made a disastrous Landsmeet end in a political union and no vulgar bloodshed that could have rubbed someone the wrong way. If she put her mind to it, the Hero of Ferelden would become more popular than the Teyrn of Highever and the Teyrn of Gwaren combined. Loghain has very little doubt about that.

Maric's son had not wanted his throne. It does seem as though he had been trying, in unsubtle ways, to share his burden the way Maric once did.

But Elissa, Loghain realised some time ago, has no intention of travelling that wretched road.

What he has not seen before, however, is the road she is intent on mapping out.

.  
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* * *

The Teyrn of Highever is about to become rather drunk.

For a Fereldan, Fergus does not hold his liquor very well and he's never been good at gradually and subtly go inebriated – on most occasions he seems to be either fairly sober or immediately hit some sort of stage of embarrassment and awkwardness. Their mother had claimed he had inherited it from their father and Elissa is willing to give her right now as she sits here, observing it.

The wine in front of her is sweet and spicy and she's had her fair share already, but she's drinking slowly, reining herself in. Her days of debauchery seem long since over.

"Here's to the Teyrn and Teyrna of Highever," she says, mostly to counter that stitch of nostalgia welling up whenever she's around her brother. Words against memories. She raises her cup in a toast.

It feels strange and it  _is_ , she tells herself, because Fergus is getting  _married_  and it's not to a noble but to Cauthrien who's beside Elissa at the table, looking pale but peaceful in an uncharacteristic kind of way.  _She's put down her shield, sheathed her sword_. Elissa's mother would constantly, unwaveringly bring up women who had transformed –  _progressed_  – in this manner because she had never been blind to her only daughter's nature.

Granted, it seems highly unlikely that Cauthrien will remain the sort of lady her late mother-in-law would have approved of but here and now, Elissa thinks, she looks the part.

"To the wonderful teyrna," Fergus adds, pointing his goblet in Cauthrien's direction. "May she always be the forceful, beautiful- "

Beside her, Cauthrien clears her throat, sharply. Elissa takes the opportunity to forge family bonds between them.

"Save that speech for the wedding, dear brother," she says, drinking to rid herself of the dryness in her mouth, that ever-present sense of no longer belonging among these once so familiar people with their openness and their spirit. It had been the same in the Royal Palace, a haunting in her blood, a whisper hammering inside her throat.

"Elissa has always been so appalled at my displays of affections." Fergus chuckles. He leans back in his chair, sprawling, with a goblet of wine in his right hand and some ripe-looking grapes in his left. An image of a kind of decadence they've earned a thousand times over but the notion still grates at her momentum, leaving a dull, irritating kind of ache.

He is granted the opportunity to start over.  _He lost more than you_ she reminds herself but her thoughts are not as obedient here, not as simple in their structure and she ever the greedy little sister, jealous hands grasping at her big brother's belongings.

"That's because you've always been so generous with them, brother." She cannot make the words as warm and humorous as they ought to be but she prays Fergus is too inattentive at present to notice.

He laughs again. "I still hope you'll change your mind once you find a man who can handle you."

Elissa takes a large mouthful of her wine, aware of Cauthrien's gaze and of Loghain's presence, not far away but yet as distant in this company as though he was still in Orlais.  _If you only knew, dear brother._ And there's sadness in it, that wide distance and those uneasy, shakily drawn lines.

"I rather thought you had given up the idea by now," she retorts, thinking of mornings in the Vigil, of sheets warmed by skin and touch and the thin rays of dawn; the way he looks at her then, the way there seems to be no barrier between their desires and their actions. If that intimacy is what her brother has managed to dug up in the ruins of his old life, what sort of monster would she be to deny him that?

Perhaps, she thinks, too, she is merely grieving because this is goodbye. This visit to Denerim, the meetings with those who were once her people in an existence that once was hers – everything is a farewell to all of her  _what_   _if_ , all of her  _never_. Everything that could not be, finally left behind.

"We were not made for solitude, sister." Fergus looks heartbreakingly honest now, his composure fractured by too much alcohol and, it seems, emotion. It is as if he knows and perhaps he does. "Us Couslands."

Elissa offers a smile at that, but it's not a steady one and she is grateful when Cauthrien rises suddenly, bidding them a good night and excusing herself. As she leaves the room, her gaze locks with Elissa's for a heartbeat and she nods, without saying anything but Elissa is aware then - without a doubt - that at least one other living soul has found one of her secrets.

There's a remarkably odd relief in the notion, landing heavy in the pit of her stomach.

.  
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* * *

.  
.

With a drawn-out sigh, Loghain squares his shoulder and flexes his arms, trying to ease the tension that comes from having been sitting down far too much over the past few days. He is not made for stillness and suppers; his body was created for battlefields and the forest of the wilds and he's eager to chase it for a while yet, before he's entirely too old.

As if she'd get to her feet this instance and order him to march across the Waking Sea, he glances at his Commander.

The two of them are the only ones left in the sitting room at the estate. The fire still burns and there are bottles remaining – bottles and two wardens, Loghain thinks, looking again at Elissa who is dragging her finger along a small unrefined knot in the otherwise polished wood. Then she lets her hand come to rest among the unfinished wine, tapping her fingers against the table instead. She's restless here, like a ghost in her own past. He knows it well, shares the sensation.

"Your brother worries about you."

She looks unimpressed with his choice of topic, her face closed-off. "He's drunk."

"Even so."

"I worry about him as well." She shrugs, like she wishes to deflect his words. "That is how these things go."

Above her head hangs a small portrait of a stern-looking old lady, the colours as dark and uninviting as the person depicted. Loghain tries to see family traits in the face to no avail, can't spot any of the famous Cousland fire that makes Elissa stand out, underlines her every action.

"There are no immediate hinders for you to settle down now," he says, adopting the role that's so much a part of him that it seems written on his own skin and into his bones. Family traits of a different sort. "The Wardens are growing strong, thanks to your hard work-"

"Settle down?" she cuts him off, spitting the words as though they're wires in her mouth.

Loghain focuses on his wine for a moment, allowing himself two large gulps of the no longer chilled drink. It tastes of spices and citrus, an unremarkable but pleasant combination.

His previous life had demanded much from him, had expected countless of things, most of them harsh and practical. This life is similar although, he realises as he holds Elissa's gaze over their goblets and hands on the table, not nearly as devoid of sensibility. He has not yet grown accustomed to it, doesn't expect to.

"I have no intention of upsetting you," he says, practising nonetheless.

She scoffs. "I am not  _upset_. I'm weary of people speaking of my life as though I have different options."

"You have a few options."

"Which are those, then?" She raises an eyebrow. "Marry some lesser lord in need of no heirs? Certainly. But that wouldn't serve the Wardens any better than remaining unmarried. And it most definitely wouldn't serve  _me_."

He can't help but smile at that, covering it up by taking a sip of his wine.

"If you intend to continue acting as the Arlessa of Amaranthine you cannot remain unattached forever." The words come out harsh and cold, but they are nothing but truths and Elissa knows that as well. Her jawline tightens behind her goblet.

"I intend to act as the Warden-Commander of Ferelden," she says, slowly. "I don't belong here. Or in Amaranthine. I don't even  _like_  Amaranthine. My place is out there with the straggling hordes and the internal fighting and the threats that are rising. You know that. And I am bloody well not  _unattached_."

"Elissa-"

"Are you feeling your Calling?" she blurts, seemingly before reason has reined in her words. Loghain blinks, startled by the turn of their conversation but he regains his composure quickly when she continues. "Is that it?"

"No." He sounds as tired as he feels but at least there is no trace of imminent death in his blood. "Why?"

"You seem intent on seeing me settled with some influential lord in the arling," she finishes her wine, puts her palms against the table. "Which I would never agree to regardless of the circumstances, but I can see you nursing that vain hope all the same."

Loghain shakes his head, feeling out of depth in this conversation that seems to have morphed along the way – at the same point where his intake of wine increased, perhaps. She appears irritated and compassionate in a strange blend, as though she's pitying him but still wishes to yell. At times Anora treats him the same way.

"What will you do about the arling then?" he asks, recognising a defeat when he sees one.

Elissa helps herself to more wine and keeps the bottle in the air above his own goblet for a second, awaiting his nod before doing the same for him. Time is strangely still in this city, Loghain reflects as he takes his refilled goblet. In the gaps between the words, in the silences, he can almost catch glimpses of how it all happened, how they were both made who they are once upon a time. History is nothing but bodies,  _lives_.

"I'm... giving it up. I think." She suddenly grins at him, all darkness from before washed away momentarily. "Not too clear on the details right now."

Maker help him but he has never found her more appealing than now, torn between two heavy duties and intent on shouldering them both in her own fashion, despite the odds and the ever-muddy path that lies ahead.

As for Loghain's own future – whatever is left of it – he only knows one thing: he cannot remain in Ferelden. Seeing Anora again had fortified that resolve in his mind, seeing the newborn child with the name he will never be able to speak without the faint touch of bitterness. The boy bears Loghain's face, he can't be burdened beyond that, not after everything that has happened. He has ruined one reign and no general worth his rank should be defeated twice on the same spot.

Elissa raises her goblet to her mouth, drinking greedily and he isn't certain what else to say so he follows suit. Then her eyes are on him, warm and  _awake_ , despite the wine. When he puts down his drink she clasps hold of his wrist, moves her chair so that she's narrowing down the space between their bodies inch by inch.

"I am  _not_  unattached." She speaks the words again now, like an echo but without the softness of one. Loghain exhales.

Their conversation burns in the air around them, along with her fierce conviction; the wine does nothing to ease the tension the subject has left. In fact he feels, for the first time in many years, quite pleasantly drunk.  _Indulgence can be a virtue, you know_ , Maric drawls in his memory, the king's eyes hazy and his speech slow. Maker knows Maric could live by that virtue after Rowan's death. Loghain never could and his jealousy had, at certain occasions, nearly consumed him.

The world has spun around madly since those days, twisting its own virtues and sins, and he sits here now mere inches away from Elissa, tilting his head as she lets her fingers walk across his cheek and mouth, towards the back of his neck where he is certain he can feel his own pulse beat heavily.

"No," he replies even though her statement had been firm enough not to resemble a question. "I suppose you are not. I could argue, however, that perhaps you  _ought_  to be."

"You could." There's a wildly irresistible thread of amusement in her tone, matched by how she seems to move closer as she speaks. "Do you think I would see reason?"

He has to laugh at that, at the absurdity of it all and how neatly it has wormed its way into his very existence. For better and for worse they have built a life together, drawn a map of its endless lines and limits and conditions. Limited and fixed as those may be, there's a rare freedom in it.

"No," he replies once more, the word landing on her face that is close now, her mouth open and her cheeks flushed.

A better man would walk away. Loghain will not.

He has been that man once, has lived that man's life already. So has she, he knows with a startling clarity, they are nothing if not two people with the shared knowledge of every cost and calculation in the book. They know the cost of war, the price of power, the value and sacrifice of humanity but Elissa's eyes when she understands what he isn't saying overwhelm all knowledge, undo every last scrap of reason in him.

"I  _love_  you," she mutters with her lips sighing against his own, his hands on her shoulders, the bottles on the table rattling ominously. "But if you call me unattached again I will have you hanged."

.

* * *

 **A/N:**   _One update left now, folks. Thanks for reading!_


	8. Epilogue: Where you go, I go

Summer finds them again.

The promise of heat behind the rain-heavy clouds, a tickling dryness against the soles of their feet on the grass, their daily duties drowned in light instead of dusk. It might be odd, Elissa thinks, to greet the summer season when so much is happening that seems to belong to dark winter nights but nature has little patience for humans and darkspawn and their whereabouts.

Almost every day now they are notified of the development around them.

In Kirkwall, Stroud reports of unrest running deep.  _A thread of darkness_ , he writes and Stroud is not man who uses unnecessary exaggerations or dire truths that serve no purpose.

The situation is Orlais is varied – calm or highly unstable, depending on the letter-writer and their personal disposition and political mind. Elissa can make a qualified guess based on what she hears that the court and the palaces in Val Royaeux are boiling quietly, the way such places usually boils. A slow simmer, then one spark to light them all.

At the same time – this knowledge she treasures close to her heart – the Wardens are spreading out, growing strong.

 _Ferelden may have defeated a Blight on their own once_ , Warden-Constable Blackwall writes and she can almost hear the irritation in his voice, his letters fierce and strong, as though he had wanted to underline them as he wrote.  _But the purpose of our order is larger than one nation's border and this is the way it shall remain._  He's worked unrelentingly, she knows. As they have.

And her Wardens here, Maker knows how they've soldiered on over the past year. Under Varel's watchful eye they've rebuilt, reconstructed and built - then when they've done the impossible someone has suggested yet another improvement or tweak.

Now they can afford to do something besides reclaiming what was lost.  _Finally_ , Elissa had thought the other day as the realisation ran through her. Years since she was dragged out of Highever and every moment of every day since that night she has been going backwards, methodically and systematically re-taking. It wears you out quickly, chasing the past.

The day before yesterday they had sent Leonie off with a group of Orlesian mages to begin their long journey to Weisshaupt. Tomorrow Nathaniel and Sigrun will escort another group of the Orlesian wardens to Soldier's Peak, then travel to the Free Marches to investigate the Deep Roads entrances there.

"Do you think Varel will miss them?" Elissa asks Loghain as they sit by the newly founded garden along the east gate.

It's a warm day, a beautiful spot of Amaranthine that almost makes her rethink her dislike for the place. The spaces of sky and water are broad and peaceful here where they sit. The stones and the trees deceptively unalterable, detached from the world and its endless wars.

"Hardly." Loghain gives her a sideways glance. "Will you?"

She grins. "No. I shall miss Sigrun, but not the rest."

"Fair enough."

Elissa studies his face, leaning back on her hands to look at it from a different angle.

There are very few illusions left between them at this point and there's a stark, honest relief in this. She will lose him too. Not yet; perhaps not for several years, perhaps tomorrow. They will never have enough time but grieving it serves no one so they don't. In their personal lives as well as in their battles they plan for the worst and hope for the best and they take nothing for granted; they have granted themselves the right to be happy, all the same, as best they can.  _The way of Wardens_ , an Orlesian brother reminds her in her memory.

Loghain clears his throat. "I cannot remain here in Ferelden," he says suddenly, though it's in the tone of someone who has been considering the words for a long time. She knows it's been on his mind since his return as it has been on her hers.

 _The land doesn't forget_.

"I know."

They are both quiet again, listening to the noise of the keep around them, the sounds of feet moving and swords colliding on the training grounds.

In a way she had disrupted the natural cycle of things when she abandoned her duties and rushed to Orlais to bring him back home. In many other ways she had not, had merely saved an important person from a horrible fate. Even so, sending him away in the first place had been the right thing, she knows that now. Ferelden's independence might very well be his doing but the history books have precious little to do with the present.  _But I couldn't let them have you, see._

"There's a ship sailing for the Free Marches in a fortnight," she tells him eventually and reaches into the pocket of her trousers to hand him a letter from Senior Warden Stroud. "I have written to notify him that we are to be expected."

He had written about a new recruit, as well. A  _"young Fereldan mage I would advise you to mentor, Commander. She could use a little of your resolve."_  Elissa had refrained from replying that she is weary of mages, had in fact not expressed anything beyond a polite acceptance to meet with the recruit.

"The Free Marches." Loghain speaks slowly, as if tasting the words, trying out their shape in his mouth.

She smiles at him. "I believe we have carved our place into Ferelden's history to a much larger extent than any two people should, you and I."

Loghain laughs at that, a laugh that trickles upwards in his throat, oddly light and brittle. "I agree."

And there,  _then_ , for a few uninterrupted moments the future is clear enough.

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**A/N:**

So –  **this is the end of the Elissa/Loghain trilogy I've been writing for years now.**

I always wanted to end Elissa and Loghain's story on a somewhat positive, open-ended note because we don't know yet what the upcoming canon has in store for them and I don't like writing deliberate AUs. With DA3 coming soon, I want to wrap up the dragging DA:O and DA2 bits of my writing and focus on the future. I have the intention of writing an ensemble story featuring Elissa, Hawke and Trevelyan set during the last game.

Meanwhile I intend to start posting a post-DAII collection of ficlets and stories of various length (fall cleaning of the writing computer revealed a bit of a stash) that will cover the time until the events of DA:I.

I will be back soon, count on it.

THANK YOU SO MUCH to everyone who's read, reviewed, recced, encouraged and discussed with me over the years. You are great!


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